Stephanie's Pillowbook

 

CAMP

It is customary to assume that Firbank was frivolous because frivolity was his only medium of self-expression. In fact he was no less serious than Congreve or Horace Walpole but he recognised frivolity as the most insolent refinement of satire. The things Firbank hated were the moral vices of the bourgeoisie, stupidity, hypocrisy, pretentiousness, greed, and the eye on the main chance. What distinguishes the characters he writes about is their unworldliness and he believed that the most unworldly people are those who are born with everything. It was a complete vagueness about money, a warm erratic unjudging heart, a muddled goodness, an instinctive elegant disorder that he loved. The quality common to his characters is their impulsiveness; their virtue lies in their unawareness of evil. Where they are ambitious, their ambitions are preposterous. To be perpetuated by a stained-glass window, to shine in the highest circles of Cuna-Cuna, to go to Athens, to be a great tragic actress and yet to remain unconscious of the difficulty of attaining these ends, was what appealed to him. [Cyril Connolly]

‘I just adore your trousseau. Too utterly Chanel,’ said Georgina to Marlborough. ‘There is nothing like sable. So cosily chic. I suppose it was screamingly expensive?’
‘I really don’t know,’ said Marlborough. ‘Because I got it as a gift from the princess Celina Scarlattia after I wrote her a bedroom sonata in plain chant. She had the costume made for herself when she tried to organise a fancy-dress ball in the Vatican in aid of destitute lesbians. The Pope was very stuffy about the whole proposition.’ [Leonora Carrington]

[The homosexual] is a prodigious consumer (and I might add producer) of signs – of hidden meanings, hidden systems, hidden potentiality. Exclusion from the common code impels the frenzied quest: in the momentary glimpse, the scrambled figure, the sporadic gesture, the chance encounter, the reverse image, the sudden slippage, the lowered guard. [Harold Beaver]

Undeniably, camp is subversive, but not too much so, for it depends for its survival on the patronage of high society, the entertainment world, advertising, and the media. [Wayne R.Dynes]

There may also be a lesson for feminism in homosexual culture that the arts of self-decoration and posing need not be seen as the attributes of a victim, but can be allied to serious power-seeking and humorous pleasure-seeking. [Natasha Walter]

To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization…
Camp… is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is Art Nouveau, the most typical and fully developed Camp style. Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto…
As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Examples: the swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; the thin, flowing, sexless bodies in Art Nouveau prints and posters, presented in relief on lamps and ashtrays; the haunting and androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one’s sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine… Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn’t: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristic and personality mannerisms… The corny flamboyant femaleness of Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida, Jane Russell, Virginia Mayo; the exaggerated he-man-ness of Steve Reeves, Victor Mature. The great stylists of temperament and mannerism, like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Talullah Bankhead, Edwige Feuillère.
Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman’. To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension in sensibility of the metaphor of life as theatre.
Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, ‘person’ and ‘thing’.) But all style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene…
… there the origins of Camp taste are to be found (Gothic novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth). But the relation to nature was quite different then. In the 18th century, people of taste either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill) or attempted to remake it into something artificial (Versailles). They also indefatigably patronized the past. Today’s Camp taste effaces nature, or else contradicts it outright. And the relation of Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental.
A pocket history of Camp might, of course, begin farther back – with the mannerist artists like Pontormo, Rosso, and Caravaggio, or the extraordinarily theatrical painting of Georges de LaTour, or Euphuism (Lyly, etx) in literature. Still, the soundest starting poiint seems to be the late 17th and early 18th century, because of that period’s extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry; its taste for the picturesque and the thrilling, its elegant conventions for representing instant feeling and the total presence of character – the epigram and the rhymed couplet (in words), the flourish (ingesture and music). The late 17th and early 18th century is the great period of Camp: Pope, Congreve, Walpole, etc, but not Swift; les precieux in France; the rococo churches of Munich; Pergolesi. Somewhat later: much of Mozart. But in the 19th century, what had been distributed throughout all of high culture now becomes a special taste; it takes on overtones of the acute, the esoteric, the perverse…
The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious… it seems unlikely that much of the traditional opera repertoire could be such satisfying Camp if the melodramatic absurdities of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers…
When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish. (‘It’s too much,’ ‘It’s too fantastic,’ ‘It’s not to be believed,’ are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm).
The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers. Camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insects and cracks in the masonry. Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Sternberg’s six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is A Woman…
Neither can anything be Camp that does not seem to spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility. Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp – what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic…
Again, Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous. (The curved line, the extravagant gesture). Not extraordinary in terms of effort…
This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It’s not a love of the old as such. It’s simply that the process of ageing or deterioration provides the necessary detachment – or arouses a necessary sympathy… Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. [Susan Sontag]

The only character in literature whose theatrical personae rival Cleopatra’s is Auntie Mame. Patrick Dennis’ Auntie Mame (1955) is the American Alice in Wonderland and in my view more interesting and important than any ’serious’ novel after World War II. The original book is far sharper than the wonderful pay and movie (1958), staring the great Rosalind Russell. The subsequent musical and Lucille Ball movie (1974) are of little worth, turning the regal Auntie Mame into trivial spunk and cuddles. I mentioned Auntie Mame as a type of the mercurius androgyne. She is an archaeologist of persona. Each event, each phase of life is registered in a change of costume and interior décor. Style and substance are one, in the Wildean manner. When the story opens in the Twenties, Auntie Mame is in her Chinese period, her Beekman Place apartment as exotic as Shakespeare’s Egypt. Like Cleopatra, Auntie Mame stands for a flamboyant, extravagant, wine-drenched, ethnically diverse world threatened by a rationalist Apollonian prude, the WASP banker Mr Babcock, Mame’s Caesar-like chief antagonist. Like Cleopatra, Mame is attended by androgynes – a giggling eunuch-like Japanese houseboy, a virago confidante (the actress and drunk, Vera Charles), and epicene party-guests (‘a woman-man and man-woman’). Like Cleopatra, Mame is bossy, peremptory, and given to ‘a little half-hour show of histrionics,’ ‘her life-time habit.’ Like Cleopatra, she has so many feminine personae that, mysteriously, she ends up ceasing to seem female at all. My Hermes/Mercury principle: a multitude of personae suspends gender. One remembers Mame’s long green lacquered fingernails and sweeping bamboo cigarette holder, her Oriental robe of embroidered golden silk, her black satin sheets and bed jacket of pink ostrich feathers. Panic and crisis: how does one dress for Scarsdale? ‘Any discussion of clothing always won Auntie Mame’s undivided attention.’ Trying to avoid a Georgia fox hunt, Mame ‘powdered herself dead white’ and put on ‘an unbecoming shade of green.’ Auntie Mame is a study of multiple impersonations, the theatrical principle of western selfhood. Emotion is instantly objectified. Costume, speech, and manner are a public pagan language of the inner life.
Expiring with emotion upon learning of her new rival, Cleopatra manages to convey to her envoy, ‘let him not leave out the colour of her hair.’ Like Auntie Mame, Cleopatra, a creature of theatre, sees persona as a mirror of soul. The pagan folk sciences, astrology, palmistry, and phrenology, have never forgotten that externals are truth. Beauty is only skin-deep; you can’t tell a book by its cover: these pious axioms come from a contrary moral tradition. The aesthete, who lives in a world of surfaces, and the male homosexual, who lives in a world of masks, believe in the absoluteness of externals. That is why Auntie Mame was a diva of homosexuals. She represents a radical theatricality in which the inner world is completely transformed into the outer. [Camille Paglia]

Ronald Firbank, the frivolous English author from the world of literary camp, once wrote, ‘I must admit that somewhere deep down inside of me there is a field with cows browsing.’ From a fop who kept pet goldfish and fed them real pearls (artificial ones, he claimed, ‘they spat out’), such a confidence, set in a context of grand hotels and Edwardian society, is just one brilliant example of the stance of concealed normalcy essential to the camp pysche. Throughout history there has always been a significant minority whose unacceptable characteristics – talent, poverty, unconventionality, sexual anomaly – render them vulnerable to the world’s brutal laughter. Hiding their mortification behind behaviour which is often as deviant as that which is concealed is the mainspring of camp.
A working definition is essential before we can pinpoint camp retrospectively and contemporarily. Camouflage, bravura, moral anarchy, the hysteria of despair, a celebration of frustration, skittishness, revenge… the possible descriptions are countless. I would opt for one basic prerequisite however: camp is a lie that tells the truth…
There only two things essential to camp: a secret within the personality which one ironically wishes to conceal and to exploit, and a peculiar way of seeing things, affected by spiritual isolation, but strong enough to impose itself on others through acts or creations. [Philip Core]

… [Elsie de Wolfe's]unceasing frivolity (facing the Parthenon for the first time, she squealed, ‘It’s beige! My colour!’ exemplifying the reduction ad trivium of the camp attitude… [Philip Core]

Louis XV had a secretive aspect, which made his serious public contradictions of privately expressed opinions rather camp; certainly his habit of making coffee for his guests a suppers in the secret bijou rooms he constructed behind the vast splendours of Versailles’ Royal suites was a forerunner of the dairy maid activities with which Marie Antoinette camply concealed her desires for a happier love life than had been allowed her by marriage to a fat and temporarily impotent youth. Many of the simultaneously prim and flaunting traditions of queens and transvestites probably had their origins in the double standard which placed Mesdames Pompadour and du Barry at the apex of fashion and power, while officially ignoring the purely sexual basis of their anomalous position.
On a less exalted level, many homosexuals must have aped the manners of the Courts of Europe, taking a suitable costumes for their own slightly uncomfortable natures the airs and graces of a Royal mistress, or the brusque masculinity of an aesthete king like Frederick the Great. [Philip Core]

Much later I was to know the bric-à-brac at the Marquise Casati’s. I prefer her unicorn’s horn, stuffed boas, bronze hinds, and mechanical tigers to the nice little audacities of fashion and that good taste which puts yesterday’s bad taste on a pedestal and radiates nothing mysterious or significant. A room resembles its occupant. It is the soul’s costume, a costume which our soul alters and to which it quickly gives shape. Once it is imposed on the soul a room shapes our behaviour. Tidiness and untidiness do not imitate each other.
Ah, how easily we can imagine your houses, Louisa Casati, you who found no car high enough for your hairstyles; Georgette Lablan, you who cycled behind Maeterlinck with your Louis XV heels; Jane Catulle-Mendès, you who did your morning shopping in a dress with a train – I love you, I respect women like you, exaggerated, marvellous women, delightful whirlwinds, precursors of the stars! [Jean Cocteau]

When Cleopatra comes to Rome in the film made in 1962 by Joseph L. Mankiewicz she comes with the maximum conceivable hullaballoo. Trumpeters, mounted twelve abreast on white horses, gallop through a triumphal arch into the forum. Hurtling chariots criss-cross the screen. Brown-skinned archers let loose volleys of arrows. Crowds of attendants, naked but for pink loincloths, tug aside a heap of shimmering silk to reveal a belly dancer with sequinned nipples. The forum is filled first with red and then with yellow smoke. Pole vaulters scatter clouds of glitter. A hollow pyramid opens up to release hundreds of white doves. Dervishes whirl, black dancers stamp and gyrate in tiny beaded bikinis. Girls flap enormous wooden wings. The show goes on, and on. More horsemen come wheeling in, pushing back the excited crowd. Drums roll, cymbals clash, trumpets sound. Three hundred straining slaves appear, tugging behind them a mobile stone sphinx as high as the Senate House. And there, between its paws, dressed in pleated gold lamé, sits the twentieth century’s most celebrated Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor. A silence falls as th extraordinary edifice crosses the square. Antony looks awe-struck, Calpurnia dejected and Octavius peevish. Steps are lowered, a red carpet rolled out. Cleopatra, still enthroned, is carried down the monumental steps by black slaves. Caesar rises to greet her. She bows, her breasts looming large around the edges of her deeply cut gold bodice. The crowd roars, and then a remarkable thing happens. The camera stays on Elizabeth Taylor’s face, made up in fashionable early sixties’ style with heavy eyeliner, false lashes and pale lipstick. And, as she catches Caesar’s eye, Cleopatra winks…

Such camp-Cleopatras, presenting their cleavages, their hordes of jewelled slaves, their grossly over-gilded palaces and their salacious reputations with a knowing wink, are doubly subversive, They promise forbidden pleasures, and they refuse to solemnise those pleasures by treating them as dangerous sins. A man who fell for an old-fashioned vamp like Theda Bara’s Cleopatra might lose himself body and soul, but he didn’t lose his right to take himself and his value system very seriously. But the Cleopatras of later films, teasing and ironic, challenge conventional morality more subtly. Why should anyone respect a man who is so obviously attracted to everything he professes to despise? As Claudette Colbert’s Cleopatra waits for Caesar to return from the Senate on the Ides of March her maids amuse themselves imagining her wedding night. She is wearing a wonderful spangled dress. ‘Imagine Great Caesar unhooking it!’ titters Charmian. At one level, of course, the scene illustrates simply the incurable frivolity of women. But it also serves to undermine Caesar’s masculine gravitas. For all he values himself and his ambitions so highly he has, in the past, been read to forget his business in his eagerness to undress Cleopatra. Either he is not truly good and great, or the conventional notions of goodness and greatness may be called into question…
The camp-Cleoatra may wink, but though her sexual glamour is a joke it is none the less irresistible…

… the camp-Cleopatra presides over a realm where the prudent requirement that every mode of behaviour must ‘pay’ is in abeyance. It is an imaginary realm, apart from the real world… But unreal as it is, its image is exhilarating.
In DeMille’s film Antony, leading two huge wolfhounds, goes to visit Cleopatra on her barge. As he crosses the gangplank an amazing spectacle greets him. He pauses, and commands the dogs to wait for him there (tokens of virility have no value where he is going). A double line of scantily clad women waft him onwards with enormous fans of ostrich plumes. He strides between them, and as he passes they raise and lower their fans so that he appears to be thrusting through a succession of soft impedimenta which caress him as they yield him passage into the body of the womanly ship. Beyond lies Claudette Colbert’s Cleopatra, reclining before a vast elliptical (or vulvaic) mass of plumes. She is covered with pearls. Loops of pearls circle her neck, her head, her upper arms, her shoulders. (Born of the cunt-like oyster, pearls belong to the sea, to women and to sex. In Mary Butt’s novel Cleopatra makes love to Antony in a perfectly spherical, shining-white bedroom, ‘like the inside of a pearl.’) ‘I am dressed to lure you,’ Colbert’s Cleopatra tells Antony, and lure him she does, with dancing-girls and singing-girls, girls dressed as leopards, girls dressed as mermaids, girls riding bulls or leaping through burning hoops. She intoxicates him with women, with food and wine and rose petals and playfulness. His dogs take fright and run off home.
At last he succumbs, and as he lets his head fall on her breast she signals to her attendants. Silk curtains are unfurled to hide the lovers from view. Dancers sway, the music ripples and swoons, the plumed fans wave back and forth. Abruptly the rhythms of the score become stronger and more urgent. Rows of trumpets are raised for a triumphant fanfare. Banks of oars are seen thrusting and retracting, thrusting and retracting, until the sequence climaxes in a wonderful swirling tangle of lambent textiles, priapic trumpets and undulating female flesh. This gorgeous piece of cinematic euphemism conveys two meanings. Firstly, and most obviously, Cleopatra and Antony are fucking. Secondly, the oyster has closed on Antony. Lured by the peary Cleopatra, he is now contained within her magical feminine space.
This is the space over which the camp-Cleopatra, queen of excess, presides. Within it everything the stern, thrifty world takes seriously is at risk of being laughed away. It is a woman’s space, and women’s traditional weapon (contrary to popular anti-feminist opinion) is humour. Colbert’s Cleopatra teases her Antony and seduces him in the midst of a bout of hiccups by means of a game of hide-and-seek. The camp-Cleopatra makes fun (literally) of herself, and of everything else, giddily reducing all danger, all sin, all power, to play… nothing, including sexual identity, is quite stable. On Cleopatra’s threshold DeMille’s Antony leaves his dogs and lays aside his masculine, militaristic identity, and the power by which he previously presumed to judge Cleopatra and find her wicked. Before she takes him to bed she gives him back his virility, but first camps it up (and camp is the humour of effeminacy). Tipsy and giggling, shimmering in satin and pearls, she picks up a peculiarly phallic club and hands it to her Antony, reminding him that if he so wished he could knock her head off with it. His manly potency is dependent on her favour, and in her custody masculinity is a joke – not a weapon but a toy. The winking Cleopatra, consenting with one eye, denying with another, subverts all value, contradicts all certainty, and invites her admirers to squander their all for a laugh. She is not a good woman, but she is something resembling a great one, and the feast she offers is out of this world.” [Lucy Hughes-Hallett]

Sontag placed the origin of Camp in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Europe. I will attempt to show, in the case of England, why this might be so. During this period, a model of the self as unique and continuous in the identity of its actions across time and space displaced earlier notions of the self as performative, improvisational, and discontinuous. Residual elements of this performative self were transcoded as markers of homosexuality, making them available for appropriation by an early homosexual subculture like the mollies, which became visible in London around 1700. Sontag took for granted the eighteenth century’s polarization of surface and content, artifice and nature, frivolity and sincerity. Her description of the basic Camp manoeuvre as the blocking out or emptying a thing of its content depends on a differentiation of surface and depth that was subject to a great deal of hostile interrogation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…
But how are certain gay men – camp queens – aristocrats of taste? Several sets of ideologically sutured narratives need to be (un)identified here – aristocracy as homosexuality, homosexuality as an aristocracy of taste, and homosexuals as the bearers of gestures once naturally located in the bodies of aristocrats.
As Laurence Stone has analysed in detail, the English aristocracy was in ‘crisis’ during the early modern period: the assumed place and privilege of the aristocrats were crumbling under the advent of real political issues demanding substantive actions; aristocratic display was increasingly interrogated according to models of interiority, moderation, and privacy proposed by the Puritans; and the development of new technologies was displacing the centre of wealth from land to commerce. The aristocracy failed as a ruling class in the seventeenth century through its inability to adapt its concept of nobility to new ideals of social utility. In light of the development of ‘real’ or substantive political issues, the bourgeoisie interpreted the continued promulgation of aristocratic legitimacy through spectacular self-display and conspicuous consumption as empty gesturing, mere appearance with no underlying being.
For example, the upper classes had distinguished themselves by an impassivity or poise like the sprezzatura (nonchalance) described in Baldesar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier… Castiglione’s manual advised the courtier ‘to conceal all art and make what ever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.’ As theatre historian Alfred Golding has noted, the upper classes originally presented themselves as impassive because emotionality was understood as signaling an imbalance of the four humours. The upper classes appeared fit to rule to the degree that they showed themselves to be free of the domination of the humours. Sprezzatura therefore signalled aristocratic legitimacy through an apparent freedom from excessive bodily movement – not only freedom from external bodily movements like labour, but freedom from internal bodily movements like emotionality and awkwardness. In other words, the upper classes constructed for themselves an aristocratic body purged of those elements it shred in common with other classes…
The bourgeoisie saw aristocratic affectation not as self-control, but as a dissembling of nature. As the physiognomical philosopher John Bulwer cautioned the orator in 1644, ‘Shun affectation; for all affectation is odious; and then others are most moved with our actions when they perceive all things to flow, as it were, out of the liquid current of nature’… Gilbert Austin quoted du Bos’s judgement that ‘nature, herself sincere and candid, intends that mankind should preserve the same character, by cultivating simplicity and truth, and banishing every sort of dissimulation that tends to mischief.’ This ‘real’ or ‘inner’ self was not that to be discovered in the formal rhetoric of court portraits, masques, or processions: the ‘natural’ self was that which would be ‘visible’ only when the subject was not ‘performing.’ Aristocratic self-display became resistantly represented by the bourgeoisie as empty shows, dissimulations concealing a lack of social being…
Against the spectacle of the aristocrats, the bourgeoisie argued that the surfaces of the body were politically meaningful only to the extent that they disclosed an integrity and capacity of self useful to the social majority… [?]

Camp is not a thing. Most broadly it signifies a relationship between things, people, and activities or qualities, and homosexuality…
Camp usually depends on the perception or creation of incongruous juxtapositions. Either way, the homosexual “creates” the camp, by pointing out the incongruity or by devising it…
Masculine-feminine juxtapositions are, of course, the most characteristic kind of camp, but any incongruous contrast can be campy. For instance, juxtapositions of high and low status, youth and old age, profane and sacred functions or symbols, cheap and expensive articles are frequently used for camp purposes. Objects or people are often said to be campy, but the camp inheres not in the person or the thing itself but in the tension between that person or thing and the context or association…
Camp is theatrical in three interlocking ways. First of all, camp is style. Importance tends to shift from what a thing is to how it looks, from what is done to how it is done. It has been remarked that homosexuals excel in the decorative arts. The kind of incongruities that are campy are very often created by adornment or stylisation of a well-defined thing or symbol. but the emphasis on style goes further than this in that camp is also exaggerated, consciously “stagey”, specifically theatrical. This is especially true of the camp, who is definitely a performer.
The second aspect of theatricality in camp is its dramatic form. Camp, like drag, always involves a performer or performers and an audience. This is its structure…
Third, camp is suffused with the perception of “being as playing a role” and “life as theatre”.It is at this point that drag and camp merge and augment each other…
The double stance toward role, putting on a good show while indicating distance (showing that it is a show) is the heart of drag as camp…
The third quality of camp is its humour. Camp is for fun; the aim of camp is to make an audience laugh. IN fact, it is a system of humour. Camp humour is a system of laughing at one’s incongruous position instead of crying. That is, the humour does not cover up, it transforms. I saw the reverse transformation – from laughter to pathos – often enough, and it is axiomatic among the impersonators that when the camp cannot laugh, he dissolves into a maudlin bundle of self-pity.
One of the most confounding aspects of my interaction with the impersonators was their tendency to laugh at situations that to me were horrifying or tragic. [Esther Newton]

 

CAPITALISM

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of motives, will somehow work for the benefit of all. [John Maynard Keynes]

The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. [Max Weber]

In fact the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. [Max Weber]

The term ‘economic man’ is a code word for the opinion that what is called society is only an association of individuals who act in the light of rational self-interest to maximize their material profit and well-being. [Roger Smith]

It can be said that no misreading of the past ever proved more prophetic of the future. For while up to Adam Smith’s time that propensity [to barter, truck, and exchange] had hardly shown up on a considerable scale in the life of an observed community, and had remained, at best, a subordinate feature of economic life, a hundred years later an industrial system was in full swing over the major part of the planet which, practically, and theoretically, implied that the human race was swayed in all its economic activities, if not also in its political, intellectual and social pursuits, by that one particular propensity…
Honour and pride, civil obligation and moral duty, even self-respect and common decency, were not deemed relevant to production, and were significantly summed up in the word ‘ideal.’ Hence man was believed to consist of two components, one more akin to hunger and gain, the other to honour and power. The one was ‘material,’ the other ‘ideal’; the one ‘economic,’ the other ‘non-economic’; the one ‘rational,’ the other ‘non-rational.’ The Utilitarians went so far as to identify two sets of terms, thus endowing the economic side of man’s character with the aura of rationality. He who would have refused to imagine that he was acting for gain alone was thus considered not only immoral, but also mad…
State and government, marriage and the rearing of children, the organisation of science and education, of religion and arts, the choice of profession, the form of habitation, the shape of settlements, the very aesthetics of private life – everything had to comply with the utilitarian pattern, or at least not interfere with the working of the market mechanism. But since very few human activities can be carried on in a void… the indirect effect of the market system came very near to determining the whole of society. It was almost impossible to avoid the erroneous conclusion that as ‘economic’ man was ‘real’ man, so the economic system was really society. [Karl Polányi]

 

CATS

How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven. [Robert Heinlein]

The cat is the animal to whom the Creator gave the biggest eye, the softest fur, the most supremely delicate nostrils, a mobile ear, an unrivalled paw and a curved claw borrowed from the rose-tree. [Colette]

Cats as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by that fact that in Ancient Egypt they were worshipped as gods. [P.G. Wodehouse]

I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior. [Hippolyte Taine]

To respect the cat is the beginning of the aesthetic sense. [Erasmus Darwin]

It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures. [Charles Baudelaire]

I love cats because I love my home and after a while they become its visible soul. [Jean Cocteau]

The cat is domestic only as far as suits its own ends. [Saki]

You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats. [Proverb?]

When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her. [Michel de Montaigne]

There are two means of refuge from the misery of life – music and cats. [Albert Schweitzer]

 

CAUSALITY

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that. [Justus von Liebig]

We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action. [Immanuel Kant]

All philosophers, of every school, imagine that causation is one of the fundamental axioms or postulates of science, yet, oddly enough, in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word “cause” never occurs.… The reason why physics has ceased to look for causes is that, in fact, there are no such thing. The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. [Bertrand Russell]

Every motive, being a different admixture of every desire a man or woman possess, is almost infinitely complex. The failing of all legislators: their inability to see that no one ever acts for one reason alone. [Don Paterson]

The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. [Albert Einstein]

Every cause produces more than one effect. [Herbert Spencer]

The law of causality is neither true nor false. It is rather a heuristic principle, a signpost — an in my opinion, our most valuable signpost — to help us find our bearings in a bewildering maze of occurrences, and to show us the direction in which scientific research must advance in order to achieve fertile results. [Max Planck]

 

CHANCE

The chance of the quantum theoretician is not the ethical freedom of the Augustinian. [Norbert Wiener]

Meditation on chance which led to the meeting of my father and mother is even more salutary than meditation on death. [Simone Weil]

The existence, real and proved, of purely aleatory encounters in life, adds to this life an element of mystery and anxiety. [Pierre Vendryes]

Happenstance must be the matter of unceasing and rigorous calculation. [Edgar Allen Poe]

 
CHARACTER

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. [Abraham Lincoln]

Talent develops in tranquillity, character in the full current of human life. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

The measure of a man’s character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out. [Thomas Macaulay]

Prosperity tries the fortunate: adversity the great. [Pliny the Younger]

Every man has three characters: that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has. [Alphonse Karr]

This is the mark of a really admirable man: steadfastness in the face of trouble. [Ludwig van Beethoven]

The best index to a person’s character is how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and how he treats people who can’t fight back. [Abigail Van Buren]

Real men are sadly lacking in this world, for when they are put to the test they prove worthless. [Franz Liszt]

Character is simply habit long continued. [Plutarch]

It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

Our characters are the result of our conduct. [Aristotle]

 
CHARITY

Lots of people think they’re charitable if they give away their old clothes and things they don’t want. [Myrtle Reed]

… as cold as Charity. [Lord Byron]

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty. [Moses Maimonides]

What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to common beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. ‘And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence (says Johnson)? it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.’ [Mrs.Thrale]

Since then, whenever in the course of my life I have come across, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they have generally had the cheerful, practical, brusque and unemotioned air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, no fear of hurting it, the impassive, unsympathetic, sublime face of true goodness. [Marcel Proust}

 

CHARM

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question. [Albert Camus]

Modesty: the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it. [Oliver Herford]

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others. [Cyril Conolly].

 

CHILDREN

To understand your parent’s love, you must raise children yourself. [Chinese Proverb]

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example. [George Bernard Shaw]

Babies do not want to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles. [Samuel Johnson]

The younger a child the more ruthlessly he will destroy. [Bulwer Lytton]

The American child-hero – are there any American child-heroines? – is a Noble Savage, an anarchist… His heroic virtue – that is to say, his superiority to adults – lies in his freedom from conventional ways of thinking and acting: all social habits, from manners to creeds, are regarded as false or hypocritical or both…
[Alice, on the other hand, is a Lady] It is the child-heroine Alice who is invariably reasonable, self-controlled, and polite, while all the other inhabitants, human or animal, of Wonderland and the Looking-Glass are unsocial eccentrics – at the mercy of their passions and extremely bad-mannered… or grotesquely incompetent…
In Wonderland, Alice has to adjust herself to a life without laws; in Looking-Glass land, to one governed by laws to which she is unaccustomed…
According to Lewis Carroll, what a child desires before anything else is that the world in which he finds himself should make sense. It is not the commands and prohibitions as such, which adults impose that the child resents, but rather that he cannot perceive any law linking one command to another in a consistent pattern. [W.H Auden]

The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them. [Bertrand Russell]

Perhaps not a single person is worthy to have a child. [Elias Canetti]

Pike believed that children should be treated like foreign dignitaries ignorant of our customs. [John Michell]

As a matter of fact, I was not reassured on the score of my maternal endowments until language blossomed on the entrancing lips, until understanding, affection, and the spirit of mischief transformed a run-of-the-mill baby into a girl, and the girl into my girl, my daughter. [Colette]

A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts. [Colette]

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone. [Elisabeth Bowen]

Their eldest son was such a disappointment to them: they wanted him to be a linguist, spent no end of money on having him taught to speak – oh, dozens of languages! – and then he became a Trappist monk. [Saki]

Savonarola exploited this monstrous quality in children. His team of boy-scouts pillaged works of art, smashing them, tearing them down and dragging them to the purifying bonfire. The same children were to follow the preparations for his torture without missing a detail. [Jean Cocteau]

If you say to adults that they are innocent, they get annoyed, but they like to have been innocent. It is an alibi, an occasion for sentiment, a pathway to resentment, and all forms of ‘passéiste’ thinking, a ready-made refuge for times of misfortune, a way of asserting or implying that one was better than one’s life. The myth of childhood innocence is a bastardised, positive and convenient form of the myth of Paradise Lost. As saints, intercessors and vestals of this pocket religion, it is the function of children, from the age of one to ten, to represent for grown-ups the original state of grace. [Jean-Paul Sartre]

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it. [Harry S. Truman]

One never recovers from one’s childhood. [Leon-Paul Fargue]

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child’s delight added to your own, this is happiness. [J.B. Priestley]

As soon as we imagine someone responsible for our being thus and thus… and therefore attribute to him the intention that we should exist and be happy or wretched, we corrupt for ourselves the innocence of becoming. [Deleuze & Guattari]

It had already occurred to psychologists that children are innate scientists, probing, puttering, experimenting with the possible and impossible in a confuse local universe. Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. Every child is observer, analyst, and taxonomist, building a mental life through a sequence of intellectual revolutions, constructing theories and promptly shedding them when they no longer fit. The unfamiliar and the strange – these are the domain of all children and scientists. [James Gleick]

Children are of course the children of their fathers, mothers and a whole family tree when one traces back through the generations; but, genetically speaking, they are also the fruit of infinite chance and continual micro-mutations and thus are not immediately tied to what is called the ‘genetic inheritance.’ In this sense, all children are unpredictable beings who are not strictly their parents’ children; then each enters into relations with other adults and other children, with institutions and a language which extend far beyond the progenitors…
… in any case one is a unique and improbable creature, irreducible to one’s multiple geneses and fundamentally the fruit of their chance entanglement. This gap in causality (everyone is a mutant) is the crack which establishes the divergence of all from each of their geneses. It matters little that the gap is only a hair’s breadth, as tenuous as a clinamen; this minuscule difference is enough to constitute freedom, a densely inhabited freedom, with body, substance and the considerable power of a relation to all that produces us. [Michèle Le Doeuff]

For children, childhood is timeless. It’s always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up… ‘ there’s always an edge of disbelief – how could they ever be other than what they are? [Ian McEwan]

[Poe] never thought of children except with jam-smeared hands (a thing that dirties canvas and paper), or beating a drum (a thing that interrupts meditation), or as incendiaries and criminally dangerous creatures like monkeys. [Charles Baudelaire]

A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children. [Holbrook Jackson]

Loving a child doesn’t mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult. [Nadia Boulanger]

People did not remember their childhoods clearly enough to take seriously the rages and frustrations that shook children. [James Blish]

 

CHOPIN

… the fate of Chopin’s work is egregious because he has survived not as the astonishing revolutionary he really was in all sorts of musical and cultural ways, but as a pianists’ composer, at once effeminate and trivial. [Edward Saïd]

It was an unforgettable picture to see Chopin sitting at the piano like a clairvoyant, lost in his dreams; to see how his vision communicated itself through his playing, and how, at the end of each piece, he had the sad habit of running one finger over the length of the plaintive keyboard, as though to tear himself forcibly away from his dream.

If the mighty autocrat of the north knew what a dangerous enemy threatened him in Chopin’s works in the simple tunes of his mazurkas, he would forbid this music. Chopin’s works are canons buried in flowers. [Robert Schumann]

Only one man knew… how to compose quasi-improvised music, or at least what seems such. That is Chopin. He is a charming personality, strange, unique, inimitable. [Georges Bizet]

Chopin’s rubato possessed an unshakeable emotional logic. It always justified itself by a strengthening or weakening melodic line, by exaggeration or affectation. [Karol Mikuli]

As many pianists can testify, there is a tactile element in Chopin’s music that is inseparable from the fullest experience of his works… To a degree perhaps unique in musical history, Chopin’s music is ultimately inseparable from the physical gestures required to release it in all its myriad variety. [?]

A composer for the right hand [Richard Wagner]

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. [Oscar Wilde]

She had learned in her childhood to fondle and cherish those long sinuous phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by reaching out and exploring far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected their notes to reach, and which divert themselves in those fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately – with a more premeditated reprise, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl that reverberates to the point of exquisite agony – to clutch at one’s heart. [Marcel Proust]

As if his ear thirsted for the sound of this word, which expresses the whole range of emotions produced by an intense regret, through all the shades of feeling, from hatred to repentance, he repeated it again and again.
ZAL! Strange substantive, embracing a strange diversity, a strange philosophy! Susceptible of different regimens, it includes all the tenderness, all the humility of a regret borne with resignation and without a murmur, while bowing before the fiat of necessity, the inscrutable decrees of Providence: but, changing its character, and assuming the regimen indirect as soon as it is addressed to man, it signifies excitement, agitation, rancor, revolt full of reproach, premeditated vengeance, menace never ceasing to threaten if retaliation should ever become possible, feeding itself meanwhile with a bitter, if sterile hatred.
ZAL! In very truth, it colours the whole of Chopin’s compositions: sometimes wrought through their elaborate tissue, like threads of dim silver; sometimes colouring them with more passionate hues. It may be found in his sweetest reveries; even in those which that Shakespearian genius, Berlioz, comprehending all extremes, has so well characterized as “divine coquetries”… [Franz Liszt]

Chopin’s pianistic style was so original, and so thoroughly discussed and analysed by his contemporaries, that it is fairly easy to reconstruct. Two things must be considered – his altogether novel rubato and his classic bent. His playing was dynamically restricted, because of his lack of strength, but within it’s framework it had everything – a completely supple and responsive technique, imaginative pedal effects…, incredible nuance of touch and tone, and a revolutionary way of fingering…
… he probably used far less rubato while playing his non-national music. But it seems sure that his rubato was always controlled, never capricious. When Salaman heard Chopin in 1848 he specifically mentions that ‘in spite of all I had heard of Chopin’s tempo rubato, I still recollect noting how precise he was in the matter of time, accent and rhythm, even when playing most passionately, fancifully and rhapsodically.’ Both Liszt and von Lenz testify to the control that Chopin brought to his rubato. So does Hallé. Liszt described it as ‘a tempo agitated, broken, interrupted, a movement flexible, yet at the same time abrupt and languishing… All his compositions should be played with this accented and measured swaying and balancing.’ The key word here is ‘measured’. In matters of exact, measured rhythm Chopin was, as his pupil Mikuli said, inexorable, and he always had a metronome on the piano. Rubato should never be an invitation to license. The secret as Chopin practised it is that the feeling of individual note values was always preserved, whatever the temporary rhythmic displacement; the rhythm would fluctuate but never the underlying metrical pulse. [Harold Schonberg]

But when Chopin set out to conquer the salons, overpowering princes, diplomats and cardinal, subjugating nobility and money and politics and beauty, he used – the études. He expected them, in other words, to listen to lessons – rather like Brecht. He broke the old bounds of the genre: technical, musical and social. People may have found occasion to practice the occasional étude in those grand reception rooms, but it was unheard of for a pianist to present such a piece as a virtuoso performance. Chopin made the étude socially acceptable, musically expressive: he made it a new art form.
What had the étude been before this time? It is tempting to call it a sort of miserable Cinderella in the service of pianistic technique, suddenly ushered into the palace by the prince Chopin and crowned as his wife, while its arrogant sisters, the sonata and fantasia, languished in the corner. Tempting, and to some extent true. The function of the étude had been to serve as a ‘helping hand’ to childish beginners, to ladies who wanted to play ‘brilliant but not difficult’ pieces, even to advanced students daring to attempt a little bravura. In eighteenth-century Germany they were in fact called Handstücke or Handsachen (pieces or things for the hand), mere gymnastics, technical exercises. Even in Chopin’s time people were still publishing this sort of pure exercise… Henri Herz published an endless series of finger exercises, which are as hard to play as they are to bear.
But in fact the étude had a rather different genealogy. Oscar Bie describes its origins in a masterfully impressionistic passage from his book on the piano: ‘It is there in nuce in Bach’s work… In a Bach inventio or sinfonia a motif will be worked and reworked for all voices and all fingers. In a prelude elaborating any basic theme, in a fugue with its strict codex of canonical sequence, the same thing is happening: the motif is being exploited for all it is worth.’ And they had all played Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, not just as a study in counterpoint, but also as an exercise: Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and of course Chopin, whose students testified that he knew many of the pieces by hear and frequently used them as teaching material. Around the turn of the nineteenth century a weighty work was published for students of the piano, the title of which indicates where the étude was intended to lead: the Gradus ad parnassum by Muzio Clementi. That was followed by Cramer’s études, which were full of technical obstacles but which did exhibit a new pre-Romantic style behind the exercise. And then there were Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s études. Oscar Bie hails him as the ‘inventor of the modern pianistic phrase’…
The étude may have become socially acceptable, but who could play it? When Chopin’s Opus 10, the first collection of twelve études, was published in June 1833… a wail of protest went up from critics and pianists alike…
… certainly Chopin thought of these pieces as a form of provocation. [Dieter Hildebrandt]

In reality Chopin’s total involvement wit the piano was right at the heart of his creativity. A composition would begin life at the piano, its overall conception already formed and its melodic and harmonic details often already realized before he set pen to paper. He drew much of his inspiration directly from his exploration of novel keyboard textures and sonorities and he allowed the limitations of the instrument to define the boundaries of an enclosed musical world which could ‘contain’ the expressive extremes of a widely ranging language… In penetrating to the heart of the piano he managed to suggest through it, and often to draw together and synthesize, salient characteristics of other media, both intimate and epic. ‘Chopin is the greatest of them all,’ said Debussy, ‘for through the piano alone he discovered everything.’ This filtration of different media into the language of the piano is paralleled in a way by the permeation of elements from different genres and forms into a single work. A Chopin piece will often travel from one manner to another in a discreet counterpoint of styles, where a polonaise will enclose a mazurka, a sonata will incorporate a nocturne and a study, a waltz will be subsumed by a ballade. His major extended works go even further in this direction, often blending elements of different formal archetypes – sonata-form, rondo and variations – with remarkable resource and ingenuity.
At its best it is a music rich in ambiguities, implicative on several levels, shy of congruence and of the predictable course. And this multi-levelled character, enabling a listener to move around within a work, to expand his or her awareness laterally, so to speak, is extended by the dialogue which Chopin permits between ‘cultivated’ and ‘vernacular’ elements. His light music is more sophisticated than that of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, while even his most epic works derive much of their energy from the idioms of folk or bourgeois music-making. In this fusion of the accessible and the sophisticated he was in the long run cutting against the grain of his age, an age which was increasingly to separate the popular and the significant…

Certainly he was anything but the archetypal Romantic composer of popular imagination. His mind was characterized by a love of order and precision, by a rejection of over-exuberant types of thought, and these qualities are reflected in his music. He found no room there for extravagant rhetoric and theatricality or for mawkish sentimentality. Nor had he much sympathy with the big, abstract ideas which fired the imagination of the age, including its composers. Chopin had no ‘new word’ for mankind and this in turn had a bearing on the relative stability, the lack of any radical change, in his musical style, once established…

Chopin avoided then many of the surface manifestations of Romanticism in music, the ‘Achilles’ heels,’ as Szymanowski was later to describe music’s links with poetry, nature and the exotic (Bourniquel called them the ‘mirages of Romanticism’). Yet in a deeper sense he did capture and express the spirit of the age, its ardour and idealism, its ‘longing and restlessness,’ its love of spontaneity, with an authority which his contemporaries immediately recognized. His music has an intensity born of introspection and it became a natural focus for the growing preoccupation of the Romantics with the evocative and affective powers of music, a preoccupation evidenced alike in contemporary criticism and in more serious philosophical writing. In a manner which reached right to the heart of the Romantic impulse, Chopin lived in his music, engaging there in an interior play of powerful emotions, marshalled and controlled by a compulsive need for order. The best of his music reflects that tension, taming or freezing the impetuosity which often seems about to erupt, harnessing a tumult of feeling in the lucidity of its forms. In a way it presents a model, classically perfect, of the impulsive spirit of early Romanticism… [Jim Samson]

The extension of the arpeggiation [in Op.10 no.1] to encompass the entire keyboard is not merely a technical advance. It results in a gesture of remarkable dramatic power, where huge waves of sound are driven with relentless momentum by strong underlying harmonic currents. And here it becomes more appropriate to consider the connection with Bach, much deeper than surface resemblances to Cramer or Clementi… The sense of harmonic flow in both Bach and Chopin is achieved by maintaining a dissonant tension over extended periods, and by long-range linear motions which emerge through the figuration, creating a strong counterpoint with the melodic bass. This ‘dissonant counterpoint’ with a melodic bass is in reality very similar in both composers and it is at least as important in propelling the music towards structural harmonies as are chord progressions dictated by diatonic hierarchies…
Where Moscheles [in Op.70 no.3] builds an element of contrast into the structure of his motive, with a perky diatonic consequent to the chromatic ascent, Chopin [in Op.10 no.2] – Baroque-like – maintains the flow unbroken in a tour de force of whirling virtuosity. The line is drafted as a series of arcs, and the interest of the piece, in a context of rhythmic and textural uniformity, lies predominantly in the subtly varied contours of these arcs as they interact with harmony and phrase rhythm. As so often in Chopin the borderline between ‘melody’ and ‘figure’ is blurred… It is interesting, moreover, to compare the different methods used by both composers to achieve intensification in their middle sections. Moscheles relies upon textural diversification, involving the left hand in the chromatic scales and counterpointing the two elements in his original motive. Chopin, on the other hand, keeps the textural and rhythmic schemes intact and intensifies the argument through harmony and line, as Bach so often does. The arcs are reduced to one-bar periods or broken down altogether, and the harmony leaves its diatonic base to explore sequential patterns based on fifths cycles with a diminishing period of sequence. It is a conventional enough device, but Chopin gives it fresh interest, enlivening the approach to the dominant by disturbing the four-and-two-bar symmetries at bar 29…
Technically the E flat minor Study may appear relatively straightforward, but like the others it reaches to the heart of the piano. The main requirement is a careful gradation of touch to control the four elements in the texture, a melody, a counter-melody, a bass line and above all a semiquaver ‘accompaniment,’ to use a wholly inadequate term. This latter winds its chromatically tortuous way through the texture, acting as a microcosm of the larger chromatic movement in the harmony and reinforcing the mood of introspective intensity. The whole presents an intricate counterpoint, entirely without harmonic or figurative ‘padding,’ and it is a counterpoint as perfectly suited to the piano, with its capacity to shade and differentiate voices, as is Bach’s to the uniform touch of the harpsichord or organ…
In Chopin the interest and variety of the music [Op.10 no.11], as well as its overall shape or ‘intensity curve,’ has to be created through changing melodic contour, discreet wisps of counterpoint and, above all, harmony. The fluid, uniform textural surface conceals an harmonic language of considerable originality. The underlying harmonic movement is slow and simple, with no significant departure from the tonic region and only a momentary loss of tonal security at the beginning of the middle section. But the structural harmonies are connected by widely-ranging chromatic movement, including passages of sliding, unresolved sevenths…
The smaller components of the structure are richer in detail – more substantial – in Chopin… Texture and sonority per se achieve a compositional significance in some of the studies which almost equal that of harmony and theme. Texture acquires value as an element of Chopin’s mature style, and its characterization through register, dynamics and articulation becomes all-important… [Jim Samson]

 

CIVILISATION

The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learnt to cultivate the olive and the vine. [Thucydides]

“Sir, what do you think of Western civilisation?”
“I think it would be a good idea.” [Mahatma Ghandi]

Our civilization grows more and more to resemble a mixture of a concentration and a Butlin camp. [Augustus John]

Civilization is but a filmy fringe on the history of man. [William Osler]

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: If profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean. [George Santayana]

A pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically. [Matthew Arnold]

Man never realises that the cities he has built are not an integral part of Nature. If he wants to defend his culture from wolves and snowstorms, if he wants to save it from being strangled by weeds, he must keep his broom, spade and rifle always at hand. If he goes to sleep, if he thinks about something else for a year or two, then everything’s lost. The wolves come out of the forest, the thistles spread and everything is buried under dust and snow. Just think how many great capitals have succumbed to dust, snow and couchgrass. [Vasily Grossman]

 

CLASSIC

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get. [Georg Lichtenberg]

The romantic artist expects people to ask, “What has he got to say?” The classical artist expects them to ask, “How does he say it?” [R. G. Collingwood]

I studied the classics and was filled with integrity. [Pam Greer]

Yes, always keep the Classics at hand to prevent flop. [Virginia Woolf]

A classic is like a hidden treasure. Its core is buried under so many layers of varnish that it can be reached only by patience and infiltration. [Jean-Louis Barrault]

(1)The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say, ‘I am rereading…’ and never ‘I am reading…’…
… to read a great book for the first time in one’s maturity is an extraordinary pleasure, different from (though one cannot say greater or lesser than) the pleasure of having read it in one’s youth. Youth brings to reading, as to any other experience, a particular flavour and a particular sense of importance, whereas in maturity one appreciates (or ought to appreciate) many more details and levels and meanings. We may therefore attempt the next definition:
(2) We use the word ‘classics’ for books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them.
In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, due to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s ‘instructions for use,’ and inexperience in life itself. Books read then can be (possibly at one and the same time) formative, in the sense that they give a form to future experiences, providing models, terms of comparison, schemes for classification, scales of value, exemplars of beauty – all things that continue to operate even if a book read in one’s youth is almost or totally forgotten. If we reread the book at a mature age, we are likely to rediscover these constants, which by this time are part of our inner mechanisms, but whose origins we have long forgotten. A literary work can succeed in making us forget it as such, but it leaves its seed in us. The definition we can give is therefore this:
(3) The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.
There should therefore be a time in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth. Even if the books have remained the same (though they do change, in the light of an altered historical perspective), we have most certainly changed, and our encounter will be an entirely new thing.
Hence, whether we use the verb ‘read’ or the verb ‘reread’ is of little importance. Indeed, we may say:
(4) Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.
(5) Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading…
(6) A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say…
(7) The classics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs)…
(8) A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives a lot of pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity. From all this we may derive a definition of this type:
(9) The classics are books which, upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvellous than we had thought from hearing about them.
Naturally, this only happens when a classic really works as such – that is, when it established a personal rapport with the reader…
It is only by reading without bias that you might possibly come across the book that becomes your book…
(10) We use the word ‘classic’ of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans. With this definition we are approaching the idea of the ‘total book,’ as Mallarmé conceived of it…
(11) Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him…
(12) A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognises its place in the family tree…
… a problem connected with such questions as ‘Why read the classics rather then concentrate on books that enable us to understand our own tines more deeply?’ or ‘Where shall we find the time and peace of mind to read the classics, overwhelmed as we are by the avalanche of current events?’
We can, of course, imagine some blessed soul who devotes his reading time exclusively to Lucretius, Lucian, Montaigne, Erasmus, Quevedo, Marlowe, the Discourse on Method, Wilhelm Meister, Coleridge, Ruskin, Proust, and Valéry, with a few forays in the direction of Murasaki or the Icelandic Sagas. And all this without having to write reviews of the latest publications, or papers to compete for a university chair, or articles for magazines on tight deadlines. To keep up such a diet without any contamination, this blessed soul would have to abstain from reading the newspapers, and never be tempted by the latest novel or sociological investigation. But we have to see how far such rigour would be either justified or profitable. The latest news may well be banal or mortifying, but it nonetheless remains a point at which to stand and look both backward and forward. To be able to read the classics, you have to know ‘from where’ you are reading them; otherwise both the book and the reader will be lost in a timeless cloud. This, then, is the reason why the greatest ‘yield’ from reading the classics will be obtained by someone who knows how to alternate them with the proper dose of current affairs. And this does not necessarily imply a state of imperturbable inner calm.
Maybe the ideal thing would be to hearken to current events as we do to the din outside the window that informs us about traffic jams and sudden changes in the weather, while we listen to the voice of the classics sounding clear and articulate inside the room. But it is already a lot for most people if the presence of the classics is perceived as a distant rumble far outside a room that is swamped by the trivia of the moment, as by a television at full blast. Let us therefore add:
(13) A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.
(14) A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.
There remains the fact that reading the classics appears to clash with our rhythm of life, which no longer affords long periods of time or the spaciousness of humanistic leisure. It also conflicts with the eclecticism of our culture, which would never be capable of compiling a catalogue of things classical such as would suit our needs…
There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count – leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries…
… lest anyone believe that the classics ought to be read because they ’serve any purpose’ whatever. The only reason one can possibly adduce is that to read the classics is better than not to read the classics.
And if anyone objects that it is not worth taking so much trouble, then I will quote Cioran (who is not yet a classic but will become one): ‘While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. “What good will it do you,” they asked, “to know this tune before you die?’ [Italo Calvino]

 

COMMON-SENSE

Common sense is not wrong in the view that it is meaningful, appropriate and necessary to talk about the large objects of our daily experience… Common sense is wrong only if it insists that what is familiar must reappear in what is unfamiliar. [J. Robert Oppenheimer]

… common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen. [Albert Einstein]

Common sense starts with the notion that there is matter where we can get sensations of touch, but not elsewhere. Then it gets puzzled by wind, breath, clouds, etc., whence it is led to the conception of “spirit” — I speak etymologically. After “spirit” has been replaced by “gas,” there is a further stage, that of the aether. [Bertrand Russell]

This is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon sense. One of the chief services which mathematics has rendered the human race in the past century is to put “common sense” where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labelled “discarded nonsense.” [E.T. Bell]

. . . one of the most marked characteristics of science is its critical quality, which is just what common-sense lacks. By common-sense is usually meant either the consensus of public opinion, of unsystematic everyday thinking, the untrustworthiness of which is notorious, or the verdict of
uncritical sensory experience, which has so often proved fallacious. It was “common-sense” that kept the planets circling around the earth; it was “common-sense” that refused to accept Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of the blood. [J.A. Thomson]

The generality of men are so accustomed to judge of things by their senses that, because the air is invisible, they ascribe but little to it, and think it but one remove from nothing. [Robert Boyle]

Significant advances in science often have a peculiar quality: they contradict obvious, common-sense opinions. [Salvador Luria]

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. [Ruth Benedict]

 

COMPUTERS

Bruno now began several years of wandering. He seems to have supported himself in a variety of ways, including giving private tuition on a mental system which he had perfected for increasing the power of memory. In essence this mnemonic system involved ‘placing’ each memory on a large imaginary wheel. This wheel could then be turned in order to retrieve the placed memory. But this was only the start. Inside the first large imaginary wheel you placed five more concentric wheels. These too were used for placing memories. By revolving these wheels inside each other, it was possible to form combinations of memories so as to generate new knowledge.
So far, so good (if a little mind-bending). But here too all was not what it seemed. Behind the successful systematic technique lay a hidden metaphysical structure. Bruno’s six wheels were in fact derived from the teachings of the fourteenth-century Spanish mystic and (allegedly) successful alchemist Raymond Lully. In the writings of Lully these six wheels had formed a mystic-logical system for combining all knowledge – so that in the end its user could understand everything in the universe in all its combinations. Likewise it also had echoes in alchemical practices leading to transmutation into gold.
Once again Bruno stands at the pivotal point. Mysticism and alchemy led him to develop a successful and practical mnemonic system. A century later, the details of this system would be studied by Leibniz, the German rationalist philosopher – inspiring him to construct one of the first calculating machines, consisting of a system of concentric wheels. In an echo of Lully’s belief in the universal application of his system, Leibniz would be convinced that one day it would be possible to construct a calculating machine capable of solving all mathematical and logical problems. It would even be able to settle moral disputes; both sides would simply feed in their argument, and the machine would regurgitate the right answer. From mystic alchemy to a memory system to a calculating machine and the first inklings of the modern computer – each step accompanied by (and inspired by) its own more or less hidden misapprehensions. These continue to this day. We see modern computers as morally neutral, yet illogically retain the lurking fear that one day they might control the world. The idea that the computer can control the world is, in its different facets, both our fear and our inspiration… [Paul Strathern]

The long-term effect of Boole’s work, followed by that of Frege, Russell, and so on, has been to reject art as the sphere of fiction, metaphor, vagueness, nonsense, wordplay, etc., all of which fall outside the scope of logical semantics. Conversely, anti-logicist philosophers such as Heidegger proceeded to privilege art and aestheticize philosophy, at the expense of clarity and precision of meaning, running the danger of setting art against analytical reason. The way forward, therefore, must depend on a critique of logicism that is not itself anti-logicist, and a critique of aesthetics that is not itself anti-art. Logic and aesthetics both have their place in the realm of reason.
The first requirement is the development of a heterogenous theory of meaning, open rather than closed, involving different types of sign, and bringing semantics together with hermeneutics, reference with metaphor. The second is a specific (formal) theory of intertextual meaning, the way in which re-conceptualisation changes meaning, the double, hybrid coding involved in quoting, plagiarizing, grafting and so on, the back and forth of meaning between texts. Both these projects entail a consideration of the logical form of meaning. In the last resort, both logic and aesthetics are concerned with form. The computer is itself, of course, the end product of the triumphal march of mathematical logic. It would be an ironic resolution to the divide between science and art if the formalism of machine code was used to generate new artistic forms that themselves made possible the transformation of reason, thus finally closing the gap between logic and aesthetics. [Peter Wollen]

Computers are composed of nothing more than logic gates stretched out to the horizon in a vast numerical irrigation system. [Stan Augarten]

To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer. [Paul Ehrlich]

I’ve noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS. [Larry DeLuca]

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you play with them. [Richard Feynman]

Computers are to the eighties what LSD was to the sixties. [citted by Rudy Rucker]

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy. [Joseph Campbell]

A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about. [Douglas Adams]

Here are terms to beware of: fool-proof or idiot-proof (oh, you mean you think your customers are fools or idiots?); user-friendly (which usually means to hold users by the hand and force them to do things one step at a time, in prescribed order, whether they like it or not); and intuitive (which in actuality means so automatic it is not conscious, but those who use the term forget that almost everything we call intuitive, such as walking or using a pencil took years of practice. [Don Norman]

I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer. [Dave Barry]

The essence of the computer is not electronic. Computers can be made from toothpicks and bottlecaps, or toilet paper and pebbles. [George Teschner]

Computer Science is nothing more than the study of patterns of 0s and 1s. [Donald Knuth]

I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20 years ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors would eventually be in the millions, someone else said, “Where are they all going to go? It’s not like you need a computer in every doorknob!”
Years later, I went back to the same hotel. I noticed the room keys had been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors.
There was a computer in every doorknob. [Danny Hillis]

Lisp has jokingly been called “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer”. I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts. [Edsger Dijkstra]

‘I believe the use of computer systems for intelligence amplification is much more powerful today, and will be at any given point in the future, than the use of computers for artificial intelligence (AI),’ Brooks declared. ‘In the AI community, the objective is to replace the human mind by the machine and its programme and its data base. In the IA community, the objective is to build systems that amplify the human mind by providing it with computer-based auxiliaries that do the things that the mind has trouble doing.’
Brooks sees three areas in which human minds are more powerful than any computer algorithms yet designed. ‘The first of these is pattern recognition, whether visual or aural,’ he said. ‘Computer scientists don’t even have good ways of approximating the pattern-recognition power a one-week-old baby uses to recognise its mother’s face from an angle and with a lighting it has never seen before.’ In which case, Brooks believes, it is possible to multiply that power by using the computer to show humans patterns in ways they are not normally able to perceive, and let the human side of the system decide which ones are meaningful.
The second major area of human computational superiority is the realm of what Brooks calls evaluations: ‘Every time you go to the supermarket, you’re performing the kind of evaluations that the computer algorithms we have today can only roughly approximate.’ The third area of human mental superiority is in ‘the overall sense of context that enables us to recall, at the appropriate moment, something that was read in an obscure journal twenty years previously, in reference to a completely different subject, that we suddenly see to be meaningful.’
According to Brooks, the three areas in which computers are more skilled than human minds are ‘evaluations of computations, storing massive amounts of data, and remembering things without forgetting.’ [Howard Rheingold]

What is a Unix Wizard? beginner – Someone who has never heard the phrase RTFM.
What is a Unix Wizard? novice – Someone who wonders what RTFM means.
What is a Unix Wizard? user – Someone who has tried to RTFM.
What is a Unix Wizard? knowledgeable user – Someone who has RTFM.
What is a Unix Wizard? expert – Someone who has RTFM … again … and again … and again.
What is a Unix Wizard? hacker – Someone who knows what isn’t in TFM.
What is a Unix Wizard? guru – Someone who doesn’t need to RTFM.
What is a Unix Wizard? wizard – Someone who WTFM. [?]

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence. [Jeremy S. Anderson]

UNIX was never designed to keep people from doing stupid things, because that policy would also keep them from doing clever things. [Doug Gwyn]

The only ‘intuitive’ interface is the nipple. After that, it’s all learned. [Bruce Ediger]

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. [Ada Lovelace]

That’s the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. [Larry Niven]

 

CONDUCTORS

James Agate, meeting a friend, a member of the BBC Orchestra: ‘Who conducted this afternoon?’
Alec Whittaker, first oboe: ‘Sorry James, I forgot to look.’ [Jacques Barzun]

At that time Lennie was in an agitated embryonic state. His conducting had a masturbatory, oppressive and febrile zeal, even for the most tranquil passages. (Today he uses music as an accompaniment to his conducting.) [Oscar Levant on Bernstein]

Oh! to be a conductor, to weld a hundred men into one singing giant, to build up the most gorgeous arabesques of sound, to wave a hand and make the clamouring strings sink to a mutter, to wave again, and hear the brass crashing out in triumph, to throw up a finger, then another and another, and to know that with every one the orchestra would bound forward into a still more ecstatic surge and sweep, to fling oneself forward, and for a moment or so keep everything still, frozen, in the hollow of one’s hand, and then to set them all singing and soaring in one final sweep, with the cymbals clashing at every flicker of one’s eyelid, to sound the grand Amen. [J. B. Priestley]

‘Great’ conductors, like ‘great’ actors, soon become unable to play anything but themselves. [Igor Stravinsky]

 

CONFESSION

All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. [Samuel Johnson]

Depend upon it, that if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery, there never is any recourse to the mention of it. [Samuel Johnson]

We would rather run ourselves down than not talk about ourselves at all. [La Rochefoucauld]

One ceases to be a child when one realises that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better (Cesare Pavese). Exactly. Not even telling it to oneself. Most of us have known shameful moments when we blubbered, beat the wall with our fists, cursed the power which made us and the world, and wished that we were dead or that someone else was. But at such times, the I of the sufferer should have the tact and decency to look the other way…
Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, our sufferings, our weaknesses, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition. A suffering, a weakness, which cannot be expressed as an aphorism should not be mentioned…
The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to confession to a priest: be brief, be blunt, be gone. Be brief, be blunt, forget. The scrupuland is a nasty specimen. [W.H Auden]

It is impossible for a man to write anything that does not tend to his own glorification, directly or indirectly.
‘I am nothing,’ someone writes. ‘Observe my nakedness, my blemishes, my vices, my shortcomings’ – and all the rest of it.
He is beating his breast, to make sure people will listen. [Paul Valéry]

A confidence always aims at glory, scandal, excuse, propaganda. [Paul Valéry]

I did with you what I have done before with those I loved best: I showed them the bottom of the bag, and the acrid dust that rose from it made them choke. [Gustave Flaubert]

A generous confession disarms slander. [Thomas Fuller]

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat. [F.H. Bradley]

It is a common delusion that you can make things better by talking about them. [Rose Macauley]

… chronic remorse … is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can, and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. [Aldous Huxley]

We should be careful not to fix a passing impression of evil by demanding that it should be confessed. [Benjamin Jowett]

In ancient China, women suffering from anger or grief would climb onto platforms specially constructed for them in the street, and there would give free rein to their fury or their lamentations. Such confessionals should be revived and adopted the world over, if only to replace the obsolete ones of the Church, or the ineffectual ones of various therapeutics [E.M. Cioran]

 

CONSERVATIVE

Conservative: One who admires radicals centuries after they’re dead. [Leo C Rosten]

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest. When they are sick, or aged; in the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Conservative: a man with an inborn conviction that he is right, without being able to prove it. [?]

At the British parliamentary election of 1826 the successful candidates at Lincoln included a forty-three-year-old retired army officer and Peninsular War veteran, Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp, standing as a Tory. He was a member of an ancient family, well known and influential locally, and the Lincoln seat was under its control. It had not therefore been necessary for Colonel Sibthorp to explain his views in speeches to the electorate. His politics were unknown, and when the time came to declare them, on the day of the poll, he was unable to do so, having been knocked unconscious by a brickbat hurled from the crowd.
Previous to his election, however, he had dropped a significant hint as to the way he proposed to represent Lincoln. He had been asked whether he would support the cause of parliamentary reform, and a record had been made of his impressive answer: ‘On no account would I sanction any attempts to subvert that glorious fabric, our matchless Constitution, which has reached its present perfection by the experience of ages, by any new-fangled schemes which interested or deluded individuals might bring forward, and those who expect any advantages from such motions will find their visions go like a vapour and vanish into nothing.’
During his many years in the House of Commons, Colonel Sibthorp made his name as the most conservative Member of Parliament ever known, setting a standard of reaction, nationalism and xenophobia unrivalled in parliamentary history. He opposed every change and innovation, regarding even the mildest reform as a fundamental attack on his idol, the English Constitution of his youth. It was his misfortune to live through an age of radical reforms and social changes, but it brought him one compensation. As his indignation flourished, so did his powers of oratory. His emphatic speeches against everything new or foreign delighted the House of Commons and made him their popular favourite. The things he disapproved of were always ‘Humbugs,’ and his repetitions of this and other familiar terms of abuse were greeted with roars of parliamentary laughter. His dress was as old-fashioned as his opinions, usually consisting of a bottle-green frock-coat and wide white trousers hoisted high above his top boots in the Regency manner. His wispy beard, tall white hat and antique quizzing glasses on a cord distinguished him from all the other Members…
An idyllic childhood in the pre-industrial English countryside left Charles Sibthorp with a glowing memory of the old order of things and a constant determination to maintain and restore it…
Colonel Sibthorp was obviously very loyal to the Monarchy, but in his eyes Queen Victoria had committed one terrible blunder: she had married a foreigner. He always referred to such people as ‘hypocritical foreigners,’ implying that they were not merely unfortunate but in some way sinister through having been born outside Britain…
… the Great Exibition of 1851, which he denounced as ‘one of the greatest humbugs, one of the greatest frauds, one of the greatest absurdities ever known.’ He prayed to God to smash it down with hailstones or lightning. It was designed to bring waves of foreigners to England’s shores, and these creatures always had the basest motives. ‘Takes care of your wives and daughters, take care of your property and your lives!’ he warned the nation. The immoral aliens were coming to rape Englishwomen, burgle English homes, spy out the national defences and undercut English traders with their cheap, shoddy, foreign merchandise. Sibthorp noticed that in Hyde Park English trees were being cut down to make way for the Crystal Palace, that ‘palace of tomfoolery,’ that ‘unwholesome castle of glass’ as he referred to it in Parliament. The sacrificed trees became his symbol of the national calamity which he foresaw issuing from the Great Exhibition. Its stages were: the corruption of morals by foreigners, the desecration of the Sabbath, political disunion, an increase of poverty and the collapse of trade leading to national bankruptcy. The Colonel himself never visited the Crystal Palace because it was against his principles to do so, but he heard tales of country folk being seduced into travelling to London, pawning their clothes for the fare and ending up naked, destitute and demoralised. The House of Commons listened to his rantings with tolerant good humour, even when he hinted that Prince Albert had an interest in importing his fellow-foreigners to Britain to subvert the national economy.
Bankruptcy of the nation was the disaster most commonly predicted by Colonel Sibthorp, which was odd at a time when expanding trade and empire was making Britain the most prosperous of countries. His first objection to all social or constitutional innovations was on the grounds of cost…
The coming of the railways provided Colonel Sibthorp with the subject which grew obsessive during his later years. beginning with the announcement that he had no intention of ever riding in the ’steam humbug,’ he opposed all railway bills in principle and detail. The new ‘degrading form of transport,’ he foresaw, would bring all sorts of disasters to its patrons, from moral ruin to wholesale slaughter. He kept an eagle eye on the newspapers for reports of railway accidents, and accused the steam companies of playing down the gory details of crashes, underestimating the number of casualties they caused and even falsely denying that they happened. He informed the House that not one railway accident in ten was ever brought to public knowledge…
Whenever Sibthorp spoke of railway proprietors it was to denounce them as ‘public frauds and private robbers’… he retained to the end of his life the firm conviction that railways were a mere nine-day wonder. [John Michell]

 

CONSISTENCY

It is contradiction that makes us productive. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Contradiction alone is the proof that we are not everything. Contradiction is our wretchedness, and the sense of our wretchedness is the sense of reality. [Simone Weil]

Some of these young men make great and somewhat ridiculous efforts to stifle the contradictions they have felt rising within them of before them, without understanding that the spark of life can flash only between two contrary poles, and that it is larger and more beautiful the greater the distance between them and the richer the opposition with which each pole is charged. [André Gide]

What an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay! [Lord Byron on Robert Burns]

Consistency in regard to opinions is the slow poison of the intellectual life, the destroyer of its vividness and its energy. [Humphry Davy]

If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing. [Miguel de Unamuno]

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. [Bernard Berenson]

I reserve the right to change my mind, however, or to contradict myself at any time. [Charles Baudelaire]

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste. [Marcel Duchamp]

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind. [W.Somerset Maugham]

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful. [Aldous Huxley]

Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not. [Stephen Vizinczey]

All ideologues have a mortal fear of the dreadful charge of inconsistency – of apostasy, defection, and renegadism – that lurks implicit in any attempt to reconsider a strong state of political feeling or to revise a basic tenet of doctrinal belief. Is it possible, even if it were desirable, always to persevere? What secret, seductive human merit is there in the spectacle of a sage of firm, changeless convictions? Does God’s angry man, in standing there and doing no other, suggest some steadfast perfection in an otherwise mutable and corrupting world?
Both aspiration and anxiety are involved in this aspect of the ideological psyche. The factor of hope – the deep longing for firm, undeviating, even inert rectitude – is associated with a related component of fear: the fear of betrayal, weakness, of selling out. Here we can detect traces of the trauma that afflicts all spirits in Christendom, the Judas syndrome: going over to the other, to the oppressors and crucifiers, or (in later, more secular dramas) to the aristocrats and the class enemy). Given the fact that a revolutionary ideology always aspires to a total coherence which is held together emotionally by an inner frame of high confidence and enthusiasm, each little doubt and passing mood of hesitation becomes devious and dangerous. [Melvin J. Lasky]

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes). [Walt Whitman]

Our most important thoughts are those which contradict our feelings. [Paul Valéry]

You contradict yourself sometimes, and that enchants me, because I like people to show their different faces. I contradict myself all the time. [Marcel Proust]

 

CONTEMPT

Many can bear adversity, but few contempt. [Thomas Fuller]

Who can refute a sneer? [William Paley]

Everything can be born except contempt. [Voltaire]

 

CONVERSATION

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you’ll see why. [Mignon McLaughlin]

Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor. [Seneca]

Women prefer to talk in two’s; while men prefer to talk in three’s. [G.K. Chesterton]

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness. [Margaret Miller]

… conversation as I love it – a fantasy growing in the telling, apt repartée, argument based on accepted postulates, spontaneous reminiscences and quotation. [Evelyn Waugh]

I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art. [Edith Sitwell]

Mme d’Heudicourt, Saint-Simon observes, had never spoken good of anyone in her life without adding some crushing ‘buts’. A wonderful description, not of backbiting but of conversation in general. [E.M. Cioran]

I fear nothing so much as a man who is witty all day long. [Madame de Sevigné]

… the happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression. [Samual Johnson]

The chief drawback with men is that they are too talkative. I don’t mean intellectual men who are full of ideas and information about life. It’s always a delight to hear such men talk because they are not talking boastfully. The over-talkative men who bore me are the ones who talk about themselves. Sometimes they confine themselves to plain uninterrupted boasting. They’ll sit for an hour telling you how smart they are and how stupid everybody else around them is. Sometimes they don’t even boast but give you an inside on what they like to eat and where they’ve been in the last five years. [Marilyn Monroe]

It is the dread of something happening, something unknown and dreadful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out. [L.P. Smith]

The necessity of saying something, the embarrassment produced by the consciousness of having nothing to say, and the desire to exhibit ability, are three things sufficient to render even a great man ridiculous. [Voltaire]

When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting. [Oscar Wilde]

In my whole life I have only known ten or twelve persons with whom it was pleasant to speak—i.e., who keep to the subject, do not repeat themselves, and do not talk of themselves; men who do not listen to their own voice, who are cultivated enough not to lose themselves in commonplaces, and, lastly, who possess tact and good taste enough not to elevate their own persons above their subjects.
[Prince Clemens Wenzel of Metternich]

[Auden] was in fact fully aware of his dogmatism: ‘By nature I am all too prone to be a doctrinaire tyrant and schoolmaster, with an itch to mind other people’s business and to burn at the stake those who disagree with me.’ Nor did he wish people to take his pronouncements too seriously. ‘Always remember, please,’ he once wrote to a friend, ‘my phantasy of myself as the Mad Clergyman. Of course I believe that I preach sense, but it is always meant to be taken cum grano. The trouble with most congregations is that either they refuse to listen to a word, or else they swallow everything quite literally.’ [Humphrey Carpenter]

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” [Oscar Wilde]

‘It was an interesting hour. I was unable to get a word in; she talks well, but at great length.’ Meanwhile a circle of ladies demanded to know what impression our Apollo had made on his visitor. She too confessed that she had failed to get in a word. ‘But’ (she is said to have remarked with a sigh) ‘when anyone talks so well, it is a pleasure to listen to him.’ [Amalie von Helvig on the meeting between Goethe and Mme. de Staël]

Coleridge was one evening running before the wind. He had talked about everything, from Moses downward. At last he came to his own doings at Shrewsbury, and was swinging on, nineteen knots to the hour, ‘At this place, at Shrewsbury (which is not only remarkable for its celebrated cakes, and for having been the point of rendezvous for Falstaff’s regiment of foot, but also, if I may presume to speak of it, for the first development of the imaginative faculty in myself, by which faculty I would be understood to mean, etc. etc.) – at Shrewsbury I was accustomed to preach. – I believe, Charles Lamb, that you have heard me preach?’ pursued he, turning round to his fatigued friend, who rapidly retorted – ‘I – I – never heard you do anything else.’ [Leigh Hunt]

I prefer to talk to a woman about the tiniest things than about philosophy to [Raymond]Aron. [Jean-Paul Sartre]

We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evenescent relation, – no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed. [Oscar Wilde]

Anybody at all has the right to talk about himself – provided he knows how to be entertaining. [Charles Baudelaire]

We do not talk – we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests. [Henry Miller]

How delightful it would be to find a few people, or even one person, unconditionally thrilled by what one had to say. [Leonora Carrington]

Mary Shelley wrote on reading Moore’s Letters and Journals of Byron – ‘The great charm of the work to me… is that the Lord Byron I find there is our Lord Byron – the fascinating – faulty – childish – philosophical being – daring the world – docile to a private circle – impetuous and indolent – gloomy and yet more gay than any other. I live with him again in these pages – getting reconciled (as I used in his lifetime) to those waywardnesses which annoyed me when he was away, through the delightful & buoyant tone of his conversation and manners -’…

‘I have never met with any man who shines so much in conversation. He shines the more, perhaps, for not seeking to shine. His ideas flow without effort, without his having occasion to think. As in his letters, he is not nce about expresssions or words; – there are no concealments in him, no injunctions to secrecy. He tells everything that he has thought or done without the least reserve, and as if he wished the whole world to know it; and does not throw the slightest gloss over his errors… He hates argument, and never argues for victory. He gives everyone an opportunity of sharing in the conversation, and has the art of turning it to subjects that may bring out the person with whom he converses. He never shews the author, prides himself most on being a man of the world and of fashion, and his anecdotes of life and living characters are inexhaustible. In spirits, as in everything else, he is ever in extremes’… [Medwin on Byron]

“Lady Blessington wrote ‘there is something so striking in his whole apearance, that could not be mistaken for an ordinary person… His voice and accent are particularly clear and harmonious, but somewhat effeminate… His laugh is musical…’
She was startled by ‘the perfect abandon with which he converses to recent acquaintances, on subjects which even friends would think too delicate for discussion’…
The Countess, like Trelawny, discovered that Byron was best in a tête-à-tête with someone with whom he could ‘think aloud.’ He said: ‘An animated conversation has much the same effect on me as champagne – it elevates and makes me giddy’…
The key to his inconsistencies, she felt, was his extreme ‘mobility,’ his sensitivity to present impressions and his acting on the impulse of the moment and saying what came uppermost in his mind…
She was perhaps herself too lacking in ‘mobility’ to believe he was sincere in both his sentimental and his cynical expressions, that his ineffable longings and his ironic recognition of the unideal nature of the world and himself were but two sides of the same coin. ‘The day after he has awakened the deepest interest his manner of scoffing at himself and others destroys it,’ she complained, ‘and one feels as if one had been duped into a sympathy, only to be laughed at.’ Byron warned her: ‘People take for gospel all I say, and go away continually with false impressions… Now, if I know myself, I should say, that I have no character at all… But joking apart, what I think of myself is, that I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long. – I am such a strange mélange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me. There are but two sentiments to which I am constant, – a strong love of liberty, and a detestation of cant, and neither is calculated to gain me friends.’ [Leslie Marchand]

English female bonding-talk often starts with a ritual exchange of compliments. In fact, this ritual can be observed at almost every social gathering of two or more female friends…. I found that when women are accompanied by men, they tend to conduct a somewhat truncated version of the complimenting ritual, although they often retreat to the ladies’ loos to complete the exchange…
Observing the many variations of this ritual, and often participating as well, I noticed that the compliments are not exchanged at random, but in a distinctive pattern, in accordance with what I came to call the ‘counter-compliment rule’. The pattern is as follows. The opening line may be either a straight compliment, such as ‘Oh, I like your new haircut!’ or a combination of a compliment and a self-critical remark: ‘Your hair looks great; I wish I had gorgeous hair like you – mine’s so boring and mousy.’ The counter-compliment rule requires that the response to either version contain a self-deprecating denial, and a ‘counter-compliment’, as in ‘Oh no! My hair’s terrible. It gets so frizzy – I wish I could have it short like you, but I just don’t have the bone structure; you’ve got such good cheekbones.’ This must be countered with another self-critical denial, and a further compliment, which prompts yet another self-deprecating denial and yet another counter-compliment, and so the ritual continues. There are social ‘points’ to be gained by making amusing, witty self-critical remarks – some English women have turned this kind of humorous self-deprecation into an art from, and there can almost be an element of competitiveness in the one-downmanship.
The conversation may jump from hair to shoes to thighs to professional achievement, fitness, social skills, dating success, children, talens and accomplishments – but the formula remians the same. No compliment is ever accepted; no self-denigrating remark ever goes unchallenged…

The scounter-compliment ritual is distinctively English, but it is also distinctively female. One cannot even imagine men engaging in such an exchange. Think about it. ‘I wish I could play pool as well as you do, I’m so hopeless at it.’ ‘Oh no, I’m useless, really, that was just a lucky shot – and you’re brilliant at darts!’ If you find that remotely plausible, try: ‘You’re such a good driver – I’m always stalling and mixing up the gears!’ ‘Me? No, I’m a terrible driver, honestly – and anyway your car is so much better than mine, more fast and powerful.’ Not very likely, is it?…
While English women are busy paying each other compliments, English men are usually putting each other down, in a competitive ritual that I call the Mine’s Better Than Yours game.
‘Mine’, in this context, can be anything: a make of car, a football team, a political party, a holiday destination, a type of beer, a philosophical theory – the subject is of little importance…
The rules of the game are as follows. You start either by making a statement in praise of your chosen ‘Mine’ (electric razors, Manchester United, Foucault, German cars, whatever) or by challenging someone else’s assertion, or implication, or hint, that his ‘Mine’ is the best. Your statement will always be countered or challenged, even if the other male (or males) secretly agrees with you, or could not rationally disagree…
Although these exchanges may become quite noisy, and much swearing and name-calling may be involved, the Mine’s Better Than Yours game will none the less semm fairly good-natured and amicable, always with an undercurrent of humour – a mutual understanding that the differences of opinion are not to be taken too seriously. Swearing, sneering and insults are allowed, even expected, but storming off in a huff, or any other exhibition of real emotion, is not permitted. The game is all about mock anger, pretend outrage, jokey one-upmanship. However strongly you may feel about the product, team, theory or shaving method you are defending, you must not allow these feelings to show…
It is also universally understood thatr there is no way of actually winning the game. No-one ever capitulates, or recognises the other’s point of view. The participants simply get bored, or tired, and change the subject, perhaps shaking their heads in pity at their opponents’ stupidity.
The Mine’s Better Than Yours game is an exclusively male pastime. Accompanying females may occasionally spoil the fun by misunderstanding the rules and trying to inkect an element of reason… They also tend to become bored of the predictability of the ritual… What some exasperated females fail to grasp is that there can be no rational resolution of such debates, nor is there even any desire to resolve the issue.” [Kate Fox]

 

CONVICTION

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that are not so. [Oliver Wendell Holmes]

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. [Voltaire]

Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. [Ortega y Gasset]

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. [Erich Fromm]

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind. [Albert Camus]

I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not. The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if the hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation. [Peter Medawar]

The certainty which science aims to bring about is not a psychologic feeling about a given proposition but a logical ground on which its claim to truth can be founded. [Morris Cohen]

With the idol of certainty (including that of degrees of imperfect certainty or probability) there falls one of the defences of obscurantism which bar the way of scientific advance. For the worship of this idol hampers not only the boldness of our questions, but also the rigour and the integrity of our tests. The wrong view of science betrays itself in the craving to be right; for it is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth. [Karl Popper]

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers. [Bertrand Russell]

As mathematical and absolute certainty is seldom to be attained in human affairs, reasoning and public utility require that judges and all mankind in forming their opinion of the truth of facts should be regulated by the superior number of probabilities on the one side or the other. [Lord Mansfield]

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly. [E.M. Cioran]

 

COSMOLOGY

My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. [J.B.S. Haldane]

Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it. [Blaise Pascal]

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless… [Steven Weinberg]

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. [Steven Weinberg]

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and the infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return to barbarism. [Primo Levi]

All science is cosmology, I believe, and for me the interest of philosophy, no less than that of science, lies solely in the contribution which it has made to it. [Karl Popper]

Is it possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless universe, living its brief life uncared for, on this dark, cooling star: but so — and all the more — what marvellous creatures we are! What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the Jinns, is a hundredth part as wonderful as this story of simians! It is so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A universe capable of giving birth to so many accidents is — blind or not — a good world to live in, a promising universe. [Clarence Day]

In 1996 I attended a showing of Cosmic Voyage, a new IMAX film at the Air and Space Museum in Washington that captured the state of our knowedge of the universe. I was unprepared for the film’s emotional impact. Would it, I wondered, have a similar effect on non-scientists? When I returned to the office, I asked my secretary if she would view the film and give me her impressions. Delia is well read and sensitive to the human condition, but she has no background in science. She agreed, not knowing what to expect.
She was almost overcome. As the ‘cosmic zoom’ hurled viewers to the outer limits of the universe, plunged them down to the domains of the quark, and sent them tumbling back through billions of years, one factor of ten at a time, she was terrified – terrified by her growing realization of the insignificance of Earth and its creatures. Galaxies collided, stars exploded, worlds were oblitereated. Humans were powerless before such forces. But terror mingled with wonder. Wonder that fragile, self-replicating specks of matter, trapped on a tiny planet for a few dozen orbits about an undistinguished star among countless other stars in one of billions of galaxies, have managed to figure all this out. That is perhaps the strangest thing about the universe. Strange and very wonderful. [Robert Park]

If the space age has opened new ways of seeing mere matter, though, it has also fostered a strange return to something reminiscent of the pre-Copernican universe. The life that Lowell and his like expected elsewhere has not appeared, and so the Earth has become unique again. The now-iconic image of a blue-white planet fl oating in space, or hanging over the deadly deserts of the moon, reinforces the Earth’s isolation and specialness. And it is this exceptionalism that drives the current scientific thirst for finding life elsewhere, for finding a cosmic mainstream of animation, even civilization, in which the Earth can take its place. It is both wonderful and unsettling to live on a planet that is unique. [Oliver Morton]

In Shapley’s view, the Earth and its life are ‘on the outer fringe of one galaxy in a universe of millions of galaxies. Man becomes peripheral among the billions of stars in his own Milky Way; and according to the revelations of palaeontology and geochemistry he is also exposed as a recent, and perhaps an ephemeral manifestation in the unrolling of cosmic time.’ This view, poetically expresssed by one who had helped to build it, is basically the modern conception of the universe. [Steven J. Dick]

If we are examples of anything in the cosmos, it is probably of magnificent mediocrity. [Eric J. Chaisson]

You are roughly eighteen billion years old and made of matter that has been cycled through the multimilliondegree heat of innumerable giant stars. You are composed of particles that once were scattered across thousands of light-years of interstellar space, particles that were blasted out of exploding suns and that for eons drifted through the cold, starlit vacuum of the Galaxy. You are very much a child of the cosmos. [David Darling]

I love cosmology: there’s something uplifting about viewing the entire universe as a single object with a certain shape. What entity, short of God, could be nobler or worthier of man’s attention than the cosmos itself? Forget about interest rates, forget about war and murder, let’s talk about space.
[Rudy Rucker]

To many an unsophisticated human being, the universe of stars seems only a fancy backdrop, provided for embellishing his own and his fellow creatures’ performances. On the other hand, from the converse position, that of the universe of stars, not only all human beings but the totality of life is merely a fancy kind of rust, afflicting the surfaces of certain lukewarm minor planets. However, even when we admit our own littleness and the egotistical complexion of our interest in this rust, we remain confronted with the question: What is it that causes the rust to be so very fancy? [Hermann Muller]

If matter exists in the universe for the purpose of life, nature would seem to tip a hogshead to fi ll a wineglass, when it makes life possible only on a little planet. [William Herschel]

If the first thing you see each and everything morning is the eyes of your cellmate who has gone insane, how then shall you save yourself during the coming day? Nikolai Aleksandrovitch Kozyrev, whose brilliant career in astronomy was interrupted by his arrest, saved himself only by thinking of the eternal and infinite: of the order of the universe – and of its Supreme Spirit; of the stars; of their internal state; and what time and the passing of time really are. [Alexander Solzhenitsyn]

This is the universe: infinity. Space without beginning, without end, dark, empty, cold. Through the silent darkness of this space more gleaming spheres, separated from each other by inconceivable distances. Around them again inconceivably far away, like bits of dust lost in immensity, circle smaller dark spheres, receiving light and life from their “mother suns.” One of these little spheres in the light of one of the countless suns in endless space, is our earth. This is man’s home in the universe. [Fritz Kahn]

The study of the galaxies reveals a universal order and beauty. It also shows us chaotic violence on a scale hitherto undreamed of. That we live in a universe which permits life is remarkable. That we live in one which destroys galaxies and stars and worlds is also remarkable. The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we. [Carl Sagan]

… in the last tenth of a percent of the lifetime of our species, in the instant between Aristarchus and ourselves, we reluctantly noticed that we were not the center and purpose of the Universe, but rather lived on a tiny and fragile world lost in immensity and eternity, drifting in a great cosmic ocean dotted here and there with a hundred billion galaxies and a billion trillion stars. We have bravely tested the waters and have found the ocean to our liking, resonant with our nature. Something in us recognizes
the Cosmos as home. We are made of stellar ash. Our origin and evolution have been tied to distant cosmic events. The exploration of the Cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery. As the ancient mythmakers knew, we are the children equally of the sky and the Earth. [Carl Sagan]

It is not so much that the Universe must be consistent with us as that we must be consistent with the Universe. [Fred Hoyle]

Matter is like a small ripple on this tremendous ocean of energy, having some relative stability and being manifest. [David Bohm]

Living things are, as it were, universes. Were it possible to magnify the human body so that the positive electrons would be as large as small shot…, a man would be about 10,000 times as tall as the distance from the earth to the sun. Were the electrons luminous, each individual would look like a nebula or collection of an immense number of suns, all of which would be in rapid orbital motion. There would be constellations, which we call molecules, and the atoms would be solar systems… We are in very truth minute universes, composed of quadrillions of suns and planets. [Albert P. Mathews]

Our uniqueness in the universe! alas, it is all too improbable an idea! The astronomers, to whom there is sometimes given an horizon that really is free of the earth, give us to understand that the drop of life in the universe is without significance for the total character of the tremendous ocean of becoming and passing away: that uncounted stars possess similar conditions for the production of life as the earth does – very many thus do, though they constitute only a handful compared with the limitless number which have never experienced the eruption of life or have long since recovered from it; that measured against the duration of their existence life on each of these stars has been a moment, a sudden flickering up, with long, long spaces of time afterwards – and thus in no sense the goal and ultimate objective of their existence. Perhaps the ant in the forest imagines it is the goal and ultimate objective of the forest just as firmly as we do when in our imagination we almost involuntarily associate the destruction of mankind with the destruction of the earth: indeed, we are being modest if we halt at that and do not organise a general twilight of the gods and the universe for the funeral rites of the last man. Even the most unprejudiced astronomer himself can hardly imagine the earth without life other than as the luminous and floating grave-mound of mankind. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

… it is from astrophysics and microbiology that we may reap our future myths, the terms of our metaphors. [George Steiner]

Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments, handled by strange, manipulative organs, may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever. [Loren Eiseley]

I do not see how astronomers can help feeling exquisitely insignificant, for every new page of the Book of the Heavens they open reveals to them more & more that the world we are so proud of is to the universe of careering globes as is one mosquito to the winged & hoofed flocks & herds that darken the air & populate the plains & forests of all the earth. If you killed the mosquito, would it be missed? Verily, What is Man, that he should be considered of God? [Mark Twain]

Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s indifferent immensity out of which he emerged only by chance. [Jacques Monod]

Is this, then, all that life amounts to? To stumble, almost by mistake, into a universe which was clearly not designed for life, and which, to all appearances, is either totally indifferent or definitely hostile to it, to stay clinging on to a fragment of a grain of sand until we are frozen off, to strut our tiny hour on our tiny stage with the knowledge that our aspirations are all doomed to final frustration, and that our achievement must perish with our race, leaving the universe as though we had never been? [Sir James Hopwood Jeans]

I do not think that the whole purpose of the Creation has been staked on the one planet where we live; and in the long run we cannot deem ourselves the only race that has been or will be gifted with the mystery of consciousness. [Arthur Eddington]

Astronomy, as nothing else can do, teaches men humility. [Arthur C. Clarke]

How anyone can go out at night and look up and not want to be an astronomer is beyond me. [Don Schneider]

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think: There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart… yet forming white surf in unison. Ages on ages… before any eyes could see… year after year… thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?… On a dead planet with no life to entertain. Never at rest tortured by energy… wasted prodigiously by the sun… poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts. Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.
Out of the cradle, onto dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity. Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe. [Richard Feynman]

The moon, Saturn and his rings seen through a telescope, a teeming mass of spermatozoa seen through a microscope – ie. a lifeless desert and life under its meanest, most inconceivably prolific aspect – these direst glimpses, without comment, without words, of dead worlds and the germs that in mankind transmit the complex factors of heredity, tics, and trifles, indeed the basic stuff of life – nothing could be more shocking to our pride, nor should we ever forget these revelations when we fall to meditating on mankind at large and in particular on ourselves. [Paul Valéry]

Since the planet was manufactured by larger forces, we can trace our lineage to the universe. This is not a matter of dreamy speculation but of fact. Hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, the fundamental elements employed by life on Earth, are the most abundant chemically active elements in the universe. The calcium in our bones was cooked in ancient stars, then seeded into the dust and gas from which the sun and its planets formed. Earth’s gold and uranium were spewed into deep space by exploding stars and swept up by the infant Earth, much later to cause us excitement and trouble. As the Nobel laureate biologist George Wald put it, ‘we living things are a late outgrowth of the metabolism of the galaxy.’ [Timothy Ferris]

In this great Celestial Creation, the Catastrophy of a World such as ours, or even the total Dissolution of a System of Worlds, may possibly be no more to the great Author of Nature, than the most common Accident in Life with us, and in all Probability such final and general Doom-Days may be as frequent there as even Birthdays, or Mortality with us upon the Earth. This Idea has something so cheerful in it, that I own I can never look upon the Stars without wondering why the whole World does not become Astronomers… [Thomas Wright]

The biologist can push it back to the original protist, and the chemist can push it back to the crystal, but none of them touch the real question of why or how the thing began at all. The astronomer goes back untold million of years and ends in gas and emptiness, and then the mathematician sweeps the whole cosmos into unreality and leaves one with mind as the only thing of which we have any immediate apprehension. Cogito ergo sum, ergo omnia esse videntur. All this bother, and we are no further than Descartes. Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn’t matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere. [Dorothy L. Sayers]

All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy.When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster. [Olaf Stapledon]

Two lights for guidance. The first, our little glowing atom of community, with all that it signifies. The second, the cold light of the stars, symbol of the hypercosmical reality, with its crystal ecstasy. Strange that in this light, in which even the dearest love is frostily assessed, and even the possible defeat of our half-waking world is contemplated without remission of praise, the human crisis does not lose but gains significance. Strange, that it seems more, not less, urgent to play some part in this struggle, this brief effort of animalcules striving to win for their race some increase of lucidity before the ultimate darkness. [Olaf Stapledon]

I see it as natural that human beings function according to universal laws, inasmuch as we are specks of the same atomic ‘dust’ of which the universe is composed. We are of the universal stuff and inseparable from it. I should like to add that this is an idea on which I like to reflect before I fall asleep at night, for it is a certain antidote for insomnia. When I understand myself and feel myself as a mere speck of dust in a dusty universe, or as a drop of water in an endless ocean, all troubles fall away because there is nothing to push against. And in the morning, after a refreshing night, I can get up and face my temporal world. [June Singer]

 

COSMOS

As I looked out from this spot, everything appeared splendid and wonderful. Some stars were visible which we never see from this region, and all were of a magnitude far greter than we had imagined. Of these the smallest was the one farthest from the sky and nearest the earth, which shone forth with borrowed light. And, indeed, the starry spheres easily surpassed the earth in size. From here the earth appeared so small that I was ashamed of our empire which is, so to speak, but a point on its surface.
As I gazed rather intently at the earth my grandfather said: ‘How long will your thoughts continue to dwell upon the earth? Do you not behold the regions to which you have come? The whole universe is comprised of nine circles, or rather spheres. The outermost of these is the celestial sphere, embracing all the rest, itself the supreme god, confining and containing all the other spheres. In it are fixed the eternally revolving movements of the stars. Beneath it are the seven underlying spheres, which revlove in an opposite direction to that of the celestial sphere. One of these spheres belongs to that planet which on earth is called Saturn. Below it is that brilliant orb, propitious and helpful to the human race, called Jupiter. Next comes the ruddy one, which you call Mars, dreaded on earth. Next, and occupying almost the middle region, comes the sun, leader, chief, and regulator of the other lights, mind and moderator of the universe, of such magnitude that it fills all with its radiance. The sun’s companions, so to speak, each in its own sphere, follow – the one Venus, the other Mercury – and in the lowest sphere the moon, kindled by the rays of the sun, revolves. Below the moon all is mortal and transitory, with the exception of the souls bestowed upon the human race by the benevolence of the gods. Above the moon all things are eternal. Now in the centre, the ninth of the spheres, is the earth, never moving and at the bottom. Towards it all bodies gravitate by their own inclination’.
I stood dumbfounded at these sights, and when I recovered my senses I inquired: ‘What is this great and pleasing sound that fills my ears?’
‘That’, replied my grandfather’, is a concord of tones separated by unequal but nevertheless carefully proportioned intervals, caused by the rapid motion of the spheres themselves. The high and low tones blended together produce different harmonies. Of course such swift motions could not be accomplished in silence and, as nature requires, the spheres at one extreme produce the low tones and at the other extreme the high tones. Consequently the outermost sphere, the star-bearer, with its swifter motion gives forth a higher-pitched tone, whereas the lunar sphere, the lowest, has the deepest tone. Of course the earth, the ninth and stationary sphere, always clings to the same position in the middle of the universe. The other eight spheres, two of which move at the same speed, produce seven different tones, this number being, one might almost say, the key to the universe. Gifted men, imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in singing, have gained for themselves a return to this region, as have those of exceptional abilities who have studied divine matters even in earthly life.
The ears of mortals are filled with this sound, but they are unable to hear it. Indeed, hearing is the dullest of the senses: consider the people who dwell in the region about the Great Cataract where the Nile comes rushing down from lofty mountains; they have lost their sense of hearing because of the loud roar. But the sound coming from the heavenly spheres revolving at very high speeds is of course so great that human ears cannot catch it; you might as well try to stare directly at the sun, whose rays are much too strong for your eyes.
I was amazed at these wonders, but nevertheless I kept turning my eyes back to earth. [Cicero]

The single harmony produced by all the heavenly bodies singing and dancing together springs from one source and ends by achieving one purpose, and rightly bestowed the name not of ‘disordered’ but of ‘ordered universe’ upon the whole. [Aristotle]

Let us start by reminding ourselves of the physical picture of the cosmos which later antiquity inherited from Aristotle and the Hellenistic astronomers. The earth was a globe suspended in space at the centre of a system of concentric moving spheres. First came the envelope of thick and murky terrestrial atmosphere which reached as far as the moon; beyond the moon were the successive spheres of the sun and the five planets; beyond these again the eighth sphere, composed of fiery ether, purest of material elements, which in its daily revolution about the earth carried round with it the fixed stars. The whole vast Structure was seen as the expression of a divine order; as such, it was felt to be beautiful and worshipful; and because it was self-moving it was thought to be alive or informed by a living spirit. So much was common ground to all the philosophical schools save the Epicureans, and for most men educated in the Greek tradition it remained common throughout our period and beyond it. But while parts of this cosmos were believed to be linked together by sympatheia, an unconscious commuinty of life, the status and value of the parts was by no means uniform. Across the cosmic map Aristotle, following hints in Plato, had drawn a line which came to be generally accepted: above the line, beyond the moon, lay the unvarying heavens where the stars moved, ‘rank on rank, The army of unalterable law’; below it lay the sublunar world, the domain of chance, mutability and death. And in this glittering house of many mansions the earth appeared as the meanest mansion of all: it was held to compact of the merest dregs and sediment of the universe, the cold, heavy, impure stuff whose weight had caused it to sink to the centre.
As time went on, this traditional antithesis between the celestial world and the terrestrial was more and more heavily emphasized, and it was increasingly used to point a moral. In the recurrent topos of the flight of the soul through the universe – imagined as taking place in a dream, or after death, or sometimes just in waking contemplation – we can trace a growing contempt for all that may be done and suffered beneath the moon. That the earth is physically tiny in comparison with the vastness of space had been noted by the astronomers: it was no more than a pinpoint, a στιγμη or punctum, on the cosmic map. And the moralists early used this observation as the text for a sermon on the vanity of human wishes: it apears in Cicero, in Seneca, in Celsus, in pseudo-Aristotle De mundo, and in Lucian’s parody of a celestial voyage, the Icaromenippus. That is perhaps no more than literary fashion; all these authors may be copying from a Greek model which is now lost. But the writer who really makes the thought his own, detaching it from the artificial context of the celestial voyage and using it in many variations with a quite new intensity, is Marcus Aurelius. As the earth is a pinpoint in infinite space, so the life of man is a pinpoint in infinite time, a knife-edge between two eternities – στιγμη του αιωνος. His activities are ‘smoke and nothingness’; his prizes are ‘a bird flying past, vanished before we can grasp it.’ The clash of armies is ‘the quarrel of puppies over a bone’; the pomp of Marcus’s own Sarmatian triumph is the self-satisfaction of a spider which has caught a fly. For Marcus this is not empty rhetoric: it is a view of the human condition, and it is meant in deadly earnest.
Associated with it in Marcus is the feeling that man’s activity is not only unimportant, it is also in some sense not quite real. This feeling was expressed in another ancient topos – the comparison, staled for us by much repetition, of the world to a stage and men to actors or marionettes. It has a long history, starting from two passages in Plato’s Laws, where we are told that ‘men and women are puppets chiefly, having in them only a small portion of reality’; whether God designed them as playthings only, or for some more serious purpose, remains in doubt. After Plato the image was exploited by the early Cynics and Sceptics: for Bion of Borysthenes, Chance (τυχη) is the authoress of the drama; for Anaxarchus and Monimus what we call reallity is a stage set, and our experience of it is no more than a dream or a delusion. The Stoics, from Chrysippus onwards, use the comparison more conventionally, to point the banal moral that it takes all sorts to make a world, or to emphasize as Seneca and Epictetus do, that one should make the best even of a very minor part. It is only in Marcus Aurelius that the suggestion of unreality reappears, for example where he jots down a series of images for human life, beginning with ‘stage plays and the vain pomp of processions’ and ending with puppets jerking on a string’; in between come sham fights, the throwing of bones to pupies or crumbs to fish, the futile industry of ants and the futile scurrying of panic-stricken mice. Elsewhere he speaks of the whole of our perceptual life as ‘a dream and a delirium.’ Much of the same feeling underlies the long and splendid passage where Plotinus in his last years, drawing both on Plato and on the Stoics, interprets the grandeurs and miseries of human life in terms of a stage performance. For him, as for the aged Plato, man’s earnest is God’s play, performed in the world-theatre by ‘fair and lovely living puppets’ – puppets who mistake themselves for men and suffer accordingly, though in truth they are but external shadows of the inner man, the only truly existent, truly substantial person. This is linked with Plotinus’ general doctrine that action is everywhere ‘a shadow of contemplation and an inferior substitute for it.’ When cities are sacked, their men massacred, their women raped, it is but a transitory moment in the endless drama: other and better cities will arise one day, and the children conceived in crime may prove better men than their fathers. That seems to be his final word on the tragic history of his time.
From Plotinus this attitude of contemptuous resignation was transmitted to the later Neoplatonic school, Christian as well as pagan. To Gregory of Nyssa, for example, human affairs are but the play of children building sand castles which are propmtly washed away; as Father Daniélou says, his entire work is penetrated by a deep feeling of the unreality of the sensible world, which he calls γοη τεια, a magical illusion, echoing a phrase of Porphyry. And Augustine in turn declares that ‘this life is nothing but the comedy of the human race.’ From him and Boethius the image passed into the repertory of later moralists and poets. [E.R. Dodds]

To compare the two worlds, the new and the old, the attacker and the attacked, there is no more prominent symbol in which the essence of each reveals itself than the concept of ‘cosmos.’ By a long tradition this term had to the Greek mind become invested with the highest religious dignity. The very word by its literal meaning expresses a positive evaluation of the object – to which it is accorded as a descriptive term. For cosmos means ‘order’ in general, whether of the world or a household, of a commonwealth or a life: it is a term of praise and even admiration. Thus when applied to the universe and becoming assigned to its eminent instance, the word des not merely signify the neutral fact of all-that-is, a quantitiative sum (as the term ‘the All’ does), but expresses a specific and to the Greek mind an ennobling quality of this whole: that it is order. And indissoluble as this assignment of the term became in time, and much as the emphtic form ‘the cosmos’ could denote only the universe, it yet never came to monopolize the meaning of the word and to oust its other uses. [Here are some of these. For things of all kinds: arrangement, structure, rule; conformity to rule, ie regularity. In the public sphere: political or legal constitution; conformity to that, ie lawful conduct or condition. In the military sphere: discipline, battle order. In the private sphere: decency, propriety, decorum (the adjective cosmios means well-behaved, its negative, unruly). As the social reflection of quality: honour, fame. As form of convention: etiquette, ceremonila. As form of display: ornament, decoration, especially in dress – hence, finery]. Had these withered away, the name in isolation from its ioriginal semantic range might have paled to the indifference of the English ‘world’. ‘Cosmos’ never suffered this fate. A manifold of application to objects and situations of daily life – applications ranging from general to special, from moral to aesthetic, from inner to outer, from spiritual to material quality – remained in currency side by side with the exalted use, and this co-presence of familiar meanings, all of them laudatory, helped to keep alive the value-consciousness which had first prompted the choice of so qualititative a name for this widest and in a sense of all objects.
But more than merely the widest instance, the universe was considered to be the perfect exemplar of order, and at the same time the cause of all order in particulars, which only in degrees can approximate that of the whole. Again, since the sensible aspect of order is beauty, its inner principle reason, the All as perfect order must be both beautiful and rational in the highest degree. Indeed this bounded physical universe denoted by the name ‘cosmos’ was considered a divine entitity and often called outright a god, finally even the god. As such it was of course more than merely a physical system in the sense in which we have come to understand the term ‘physical’. As the generative, life-begetting powers of nature bespeak the presence of soul, and the eternal regularity and harmony of the celestial motions the action of an ordering mind, the world must be considered as one animated and intelligent whole, and even as wise. Already Plato, though not regarding the cosmos as the highest being itself, called it the highest sensible being, ‘a god’, and ‘in very truth a living creature with soul and reason.’ It is superior to man, who is not even the best thing within the world: the heavenly bodies are his betters, both in substance and in the purity and steadiness of the intelligence that activates their motion… [Hans Jonas]

It establishes the connection between cosmology and ethics, between the apotheosis of the universe and the ideal of human perfection; man’s task is the theoretical one of ‘imitating’ the universe, the latter being explained in a fuller statement as ‘imitating the order of the heavens in the manner and constancy of one’s life’ (Cicero, Cato Major). To the Christian reader the reminder may not be out of place that it is the visible heavens (not the spiritual ‘heaven’ of faith) which provides the paradigm of huamn existence…
The veneration of the cosmos is the veneration of the whole of which man himself is a part. The recognition of and compliance with his position as a part is one aspect of man’s proper relation to the universe in the conduct of his life. It is based on the interpretation of his existence in terms of the larger whole, whose very perfection consists in the integration of all its parts. In this sense man’s cosmic piety submits his being to the requirements of what is better than himself and the source of all that is good. But at the same time man is not just a part like other parts making up the universe, but through the possession of a mind a part that enjoys identity with the ruling principle of the whole. Thus the other aspect of man’s proper relation to the universe is that of adequating his own existence, confined as it is as a mere part, to the essence of the whole, of reproducing the latter in his own being through understanding and action. The understanding is one of reason by reason, cosmic reason by human reason, ie of like by like: in achieving this knowing relation, human reason dissimulate itself to the kindred reason of the whole, thereby transcending the position of a mere part. In the calm and order of the moral life conducted on this intellectual basis the cosmos is ‘imitated also practically, and thus whole is once more appropriated by the art in the role of an exemplar.
We are spectators and actors alike of the grand play, but we can be the latter successfully and to our own happiness only if we are the fromer in an ever more comprehensive sweep – encompassing our own acting itself.
Nature did not destine us for a base and ignoble existence but introduced us into life and the universe as if into a great festive gathering, that we might be spectators of their contending for the prizes of victory and assiduous contenders with them ourselves…. [If someone could look at the world from on high and behold the wealth of beauty in it] he would soon know what we were born for.’
Grand and inspiring as this conception is, it must not be overlooked that it represented a position of retreat inasmuch as its appeal was addressed to a human subject that was no longer a part of anything except the universe…
Stoic pantheism, and generally the physico-theology of post-Aristotelian thought, substituted for the relation between citizen and city that between the individual and the cosmos, the larger living whole… Now it was the cosmos that was declared to be the great ‘city of gods and men,’ and to be a citizen of the universe, a cosmopolites, was now considered to be the goal by which otherwise isolated man could set his course. He was asked, as it were, to adopt the cause of the universe as his own, that is, to identify himself with that cause directly, across all intermediaries, and to relate his inner self, his logos, to the logos of the whole.
The practical side of this identification consisted in his affirming and faithfully performing the role allotted to him by the whole, in just that place and station in which cosmic destiny had set him. Wisdom conferred inner freedom in shouldering the tasks, composure in facing the whims of fortune besettting their execution, but did not set or revise the tasks themselves. ‘To play one’s part’ – that figure of speech on which Stoic ethics dwells so much – unwittingly reveals the fictitious element in the construction. A role played is substituted for a real function performed. The actors on the stage behave ‘as if’ they acted their choice, and ‘as if’ their actions mattered. What actually matters is only to play well rather than boldly, with no genuine relevance to the outcome. The actors, bravely palying, are their own audince.
In the phrase of playing one’s part there is a bravado that hides a deeper, if proud, resignation, and only a shift in attitude is need to view the great spectacle quite differently. Does the whole really care, does it concern itself in the part that is I? The Stoics averred that is does by equating heimarmene with pronoia, cosmic fate with providence. And does my part, however I play it, really contribute, does it make a difference to the whole? The Stoics averred that it does by their analogy between the cosmos and the city. But the very comparison brings out the tenuousness of the argument, for – in contrast to what is true in the polis – no case can be made out for my relevance in the cosmic scheme, which is entirely outside my control and in which my part is thus reduced to a passivity which in the polis it did not have… [Hans Jonas]

The new inspiration of civilized life was based, first, on the discovery, through long and meticulous, carefully checked and rechecked observations, that there were, besides the sun and moon, five other visible or barely visible heavenly spheres (to wit, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) which in established courses, according to established laws, aong the ways followed by the sun and moon, among the fixed stars; and then, second, on the almost insane, playful, yet potentially terrible notion that the laws governing the movements of the seven heavenly spheres should in some mystical way be the same as those governing the life and thought of men on earth The whole city, not simply the temple area, was now conceived as an imitation on earth of the cosmic order, a sociological ‘middle cosmos’, or mesocosm, established by priestcraft between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of the individual, making visible the one essential form of all. The king was the centre, as a human representative of the power made celestially manifest either in the sun or the moon, according to the focus of the local cult; the walled city was orgainized architecturally in the design of a quartered circle (like the circles designed on the ceramic ware of the period just preceding), centred around the pivotal sanctum of the palace or ziggurat (as the ceramic designs around the cross, rosette, or swastika); and there was a mathematically structured calendar to regulate the seasons of the city’s life according to the passsages of the sun and moon among the stars – as well as a highly developed system of liturgical arts, including music, the art rendering audible to human ears the world-ordering harmony of the celestial spheres…
And should we now attempt to formulate the sense or meaning of that mythological root – the life-inspiring monad that precipitated the image of man’s destiny as an organ of the living cosmos – we might say that the psychological need to bring the parts of a large and socially differentiated settled community, comprising a number of newly developed social classes (priests, kings, merchants, and peasants), into an orderly relationship to each other, and simultaneously to suggest the play through all of a higher, all-suffusing, all-informing, energizing principle – this profoundly felt psychological as well as sociological requirement must have been fulfilled with the recognition, some time in the fourth millennium BC, of the orderly round-dance of the five visible planets and the sun and the moon through the constellations of the zodiac. This celestial order then became the model for mankind in the building of an earthly order of coordinated wills – a model for both kings and philosophers, inasmuch as it seemed to show forth the supporting law not only of the universe but of every particle within it. In our normal earthly way of knowledge, we may become distracted by the multiplicity of the world’s effects, as well as by our misdirected desires for personal power and pleasure, and, losing touch with the inward order of our being, go astray. But the law of heaven now shall set us aright; for, as we read – once again – in the words of Plato: ‘The motions akin to the divine part in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe; these, therefore, every man should follow, and correcting those circuits in the head that were deranged at birth, by learning to know the harmonies and revolutions of the world, he should bring the intelligent part, according to its pristine nature, into the likeness of that which intelligence discerns, and thereby win the fulfillment of the best in life set by the gods before mankind both for this present time and for the life to come.’
The Egyptian term for this universal order was Ma’at; in India it is Dharma; and in China, Tao.
And if we now try to convey in a sentence the sense and meaning of all the myths and rituals that have sprung from this conception of a universal order, we may say that they are its structuring agents, functioning to bring the human order into accord with the celestial. ‘Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.’ The myths and rites constitute a mesocosm – a mediating, middle cosmos, through which the microcosm of the individual is brought into relation to the macrocosm of the all. And this mesocosm is the entire context of the body social, which is thus a kind of living poem, hymn, or icon of mud and reeds, and of flesh and blood, and of dreams, fashioned into the art form of the hieratic city state. Life on earth is to mirror, as nearly perfectly as is possible in human bodies, the almost hidden – yet now discovered – order of the pageant of the spheres. [Joseph Campbell]

According to Mesopotamian beliefs, the Tigris has its model in the star Anunit and the Euphrates in the star of the Swallow…
Cities too have their divine prototypes. All the Babylonian cities had their archetypes in the constellations: Sippara in Cancer, Nineveh in Ursa Major, Assur in Arcturus, etc. Sennacherib has Nineveh built according to the ‘forms… delineated from distant ages by the writings of the heavens-of-stars’…
The world that surrounds us, then, the world in which the presence and the work of man are felt – the mountains that he climbs, populated and cultivated regions, navigable rivers, cities, sanctuaries – all these have an extraterrestrial archetype, be it conceived as a plan, as a form, or purely and simply as a ‘double’ existing on a higher cosmic level. But everything in the world that surrounds us does not have a prototype of this kind. For example, desert regions inhabited by monsters, uncultivated lands, unknown seas on which no navigator has dared to venture, do not share with the city of Babylon, or the Egyptian nome, the privilege of a differentiated prototype. They correspond to a mythical model, but of another nature: all these wild, uncultivated regions and the like are assimilated to chaos; they still participate in the undifferentiated, formless modality of pre-Creation. This is why, when possession is taken of a territory – that is, when its exploitation begins – rites are performed that symbolically repeat the act of Creation: the uncultivated zone is first ‘cosmicized’, then inhabited. [Mircea Eliade]

Just as matter and form are linked, so too are spirit and matter: there is no opposition, or split, between God and the world, between body and soul; rather, they are one and the same force operating through a continuity of relationships. In such a context, natural order and human order are not in opposition; instead, they are united: man’s destiny finds a continuation in natural events, while the latter are, in turn, enriched with deep spiritual vibrations. In Magiae Naturalis, the chapter on ‘Sympathy and Antipathy Among Things,’ which follows that on ‘Forms,’ explains how they must be conceived of and used. The idea of sympathy and antipathy among all things in the universe, although a philosophical concept, is at the heart of ancient medicine itself, as well as a large part of magic, and it is typical of Renaissance spirituality, from Giordano Bruno to Robert Fludd. In Latin, as in Greek, sympathia means to have the same feelings, to enjoy a moral affinity. Cosmic sympathy thus appears to be based on a relationship of conformity, which is not simply an analogy of form, but rather, a similarity of sentiment. The magical view of the universe sees it as a vast, passionate play of friendships and enmities, violent phobias and fatal attractions, sordid plots and tender allegiances between men and animals, animals and animals, animals and plants, plants and stones, stones and stars, and stars and men. It is the magician, as well as the physiognomist, who knows how to find the secret links within this cosmic theatre.
With magic, similar forms involve similar behaviours, and mysterious relationships and alliances. A similarity in form is linked to a similarity in behaviour: ‘Selenite is a stone which bears engraved in it the image of the moon, which makes it wax and wane as the days follow each other.’ Or the sunflower, wich is shaped like the sun, and follows the sun with its corolla.
Within this view, the world appears to be interpreted in a symptomatic way, wherein things are signs for other things only when there is some resemblance between the two. Thanks to this harmony of interrelations, an object can signify another one and, in contemplating a visible object, we can glimpse the invisible world, and even the soul. The question of sympathy becomes thus inscribed in that of resemblance: a similarity of sentiment strictly linked to a similarity of form. The assumption of an analogy of formal relationships thus establishes an ethical and passional similarity amoong all things within a cosmic physiognomy.
The cosmic system of correspondences belongs to an organicist view of the universe, which institutes a system of equivalences between macrocosm and microcosm. The Stoics conceived of the cosmos as a living organism, endowed with reason and capable of generating reasoning microcosms, linked in turn to the macrocosm by universal sympathy. The pneuma, as psychic spirit, resides in the heart and rules the human body, just as the pneuma as universal spirit resides in the sun and rules world. [Patrizia Magli]

 

COURAGE

Love of fame, fear of disgrace, schemes for advancement, desire to make life comfortable and pleasant, and the urge to humiliate others are often at the root of the valour men hold in such high esteem. [La Rochefoucauld]

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward. [Mark Twain]

That is at bottom the only courage demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. [Rainer Maria Rilke]

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. [C.S. Lewis]

… in some things to be overcome is more honest and laudable than to conquer. [John Milton]

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule. [Miguel de Unamuno]

Courage consists not in hazarding without fear; but being resolutely minded in a just cause. [Plutarch]

Most acts of assent require far more courage than most acts of protest, since courage is clearly a readiness to risk self-humiliation. [Nigel Dennis]

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward. [Jean Paul Richter]

Perfect valour consists in doing without witnesses what one would be capable of doing before the world at large. [La Rochefoucauld]

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice. [Charles Lamb]

 

CREATION

He who has never been seized – were it in a dream! – by a project he is free to abandon, the adventure of a construction already completed when others see it only beginning; who has never experienced either the fire of enthusiasm that utterly consumes a moment of himself, the poison of conception, the scruples, the chill of interior objections, as well as that struggle between alternative ideas in which the stronger and more universal must triumph, even over habit, even over novelty; the man who never, in the whiteness of his paper, has seen an image troubled by the possible and by regret for all the symbols that will not be chosen, any more than he has seen, in the limpid air, a building that does not exist; the man who has not been haunted by the intoxication of a distant aim, by anxiety as to means, by the foreknowledge of delays and despair, by the calculation of successive phases, or by the reasoning that is projected into the future to designate the very things that must not be reasoned about even then: that man, however great his knowledge, will never know the riches or the broad intellectual domains that are illuminated by the conscious act of constructing. [Paul Valéry]

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. [Charles Mingus]

A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation, but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life. [Lucien Freud]

I want to say, say, say, everything I know, everything I think, everything I sense, everything which delights and hurts and astonishes me. [Colette]

Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside us. [Oliver Wendell Holmes]

He who is truly creative can distinguish between those matters worthy of change and those that are not worth the effort. [Robert Q. Wilson]

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down. [Hector Berlioz]

Ah, it is heavenly while it lasts. A sort of intoxication… You see suddenly, as in a finished picture, the entire shape and design of what you want to do. I don’t say that you ever carry it out to your satisfaction, but for one brief moment of illumination you have apprehended the unity of what you meant. That is… one of the few moments in life worth living. No matter if it only lasts ten minutes while you are soaking in a hot bath. [Vita Sackville-West]

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down… some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today. [Aaron Copland]

Read. Do not brood. Immerse yourself in long study: only the habit of persistent work can make one continually content; it produces an opium that numbs the soul. I have lived through periods of atrocious ennui, spinning in a void, bored to distraction. One preserves oneself by dint of steadiness and pride…
I am leading an austere life, stripped of all external pleasure, and am sustained only by a kind of permanent frenzy, which sometimes makes me weep tears of impotence but never abates. I love my work with a love that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly.
Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don’t come, when I find I haven’t written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride that makes me pant after a chimera. A quarter of an hour later, everything has changed; my heart is pounding with joy. [Gustave Flaubert]

It is not in life but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found. [George Woodcock]

My attitude to writing is like when you do wallpapering, you remember where all the little bits are that don’t meet. And then your friends say: It’s terrific! [Harrison Birtwistle]

The function of a creative artist consists of making laws, not in following laws already made. [Ferruccio Busoni]

Works of art give us the idea of men who are more accurate, more masters of themselves, of their eyes and hands, more strongly differentiated and better organised than the spectator who, looking at the finished work, fails to see all that went to its making: all the first attempts, the repaintings, the artist’s moments of despair and sacrifice, his borrowing and subterfuges, the years of study, and – last but not least – his strokes of luck. Thus they know nothing of what is unapparent in the finished work, all that now is hidden, resolved, or dissolved into it, is left unsaid or gainsaid: all, in short, that is consonant with human nature and adverse to that craving for the marvellous which is, nonetheless, one of human nature’s basic instincts. [Paul Valéry]

The public is rarely permitted to take a peek behind the scenes at the vacillating crudities, of the true purpose seized at the last moment, at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene-changing, the step ladders and demon traps, the red paint and black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio. [Edgar Allen Poe]

… one does not create themes, motives, rhythms and harmonies; one composes the whole pice of which these features are but the individual details. Some vision of the work as an entitiy precedes the composition of its tiniest cell. Here I can speak from personal experience, and the experience of every composer with whom I have ever discussed the matter: one scarcely ever begins with a chord or a tune, but with an idea of a work that slowly assumes a distinctive size, shape, colour, internal motion and character according to its inborn expressive intention. Like a ship at night, or an iceberg through the fog, its bulk looms into the composer’s mind. Then , in his head, ‘the working-out in breadth, length, height and depth begins… I hear and see the picture as a whole take shape and stand before me as though cast in a single piece, so that all that is left is the work of writing it down’ [Beethoven]. [Malcolm MacDonald]

I know nothing so dreary as the feeling that you can’t make the sounds or write the words that your whole creative being is yearning for. [Noel Coward]

A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one. [Dmitri Shostakovich]

I don’t let myself get carried away by my own ideas – I abandon 19 out of 20 of them every day. [Gustav Mahler]

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another… and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world. [Leonard Bernstein]

There is only one real happiness in life, and that is the happiness of creating. [Frederick Delius]

Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you. [Gustav Holst]

An orgy of self-expression is no more productive than blind obedience to rules. [Rudolf Arnheim]

Favourable conditions? There are none such, for an artist. Life itself is an ‘unfavourable condition’. Every act of creation” is a rebellion against, a remoulding of, a reworking of life – no matter how happy that life is. If not in the teeth of rivals, then in the teeth of ancestors, if not of hostility – life-denying, then of goodwill – life-sapping. Life doesn’t make good raw material for art. Brutal as it may seem, the most unfavourable conditions can be the most favourable (remember the sailor’s prayer: ‘Lord, send me a shore to push off from, a sandbank to float free from, and a storm to withstand!’). [Marina Tsevetaeva]

The whole difference between a construction and a creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists. [G.K. Chesterton]

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. [Ray Bradbury]

Why should I want to make anything up? Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it. [Douglas Adams]

Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house. [Benjamin Britten]

Limits increase creativity. [Kim Stimpson]

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. [Scott Adams]

It has always been a terrible thing for me that if you compose something there is no means of hearing it other than at a concert. This is like relating the most precious secrets of one’s soul to police officials. [Mily Balakirev]

Painting is the pattern of one’s own nervous system being projected on canvas. [Francis Bacon]

We do not compose – we are composed. [attributed to Gustav Mahler]

We treat as if they were gratuitous, ‘gifts from the gods,’ a host of things that were bought with human lives; pearls for which a diver vomited his lifeblood, books that only just escaped being burned. [Paul Valéry]

A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust. [E.M. Cioran]

In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away. [Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]

 

CRITICISM

The best criticism of any work, to my mind the only criticism of any work that is of permanent or even moderately durable value, comes from the creative writer or artist who does the next job. [Ezra Pound]

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music. [Igor Stravinsky]

The fact is that criticism has not entirely freed itself of its old task: that of being a sort of cultivated accompaniment to reading – to the reading we are doing here and now. Since certain works continue to be read, the desire spontaneously arises of showing that they are ‘contemporary,’ and thus of emphasising what allows them to be wrenched out of the hard earth of the past and laid in our lap. This betokens a relationship with texts whose distant roots lie in Greek, and above all in Christian allegorical exegesis. It is based on the belief, however banalised nowadays, that there are messages in the past that not only concern us but which in a sense were written for us and us alone, and whose meaning will be fully revealed only in the light of our exegesis. An agreeable superstition indeed and a highly useful one ‘for life’: but for precisely this reason it concerns the student of the contemporary mentality, not the historian. The latter – unless desirous of turning into that legendary figure whose only pleasure lay in contemplating his own reflection – must concentrate on the dissimilarities and ruptures: on what has been lost and become irretrievably unfamiliar, and which we can ‘re-familiarise’ only by doing such violence to it that we distort the objective, material consistency of every work which it is the task of scientific knowledge to reconstruct and ’salvage.’ [Frano Moretti]

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is simply concerned with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind. [Oscar Wilde]

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. [Oscar Wilde]

What is the function of a critic? So far as I am concerned, he can do me one or more of the following services:
(1) Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.
(2) Convince me that I have undervalued an author or work because I have not read them carefully enough.
(3) Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
(4) Give a ‘reading’ of a work which increases my understanding of it.
(5) Throw light upon the process of artistic ‘Making.’
(6) Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.
The first three of these services demand scholarship. A scholar is not merely someone whose knowledge is extensive; the knowledge must be of value to others. One would not call a man who knew the Manhattan Telephone Directory by heart a scholar, because one cannot imagine circumstances in which he would acquire a pupil. Since scholarship implies a relation between one who knows more and one who knows less, it may be temporary; in relation to the republic, every reviewer is, temporarily, a scholar, because he has read the book he is reviewing and the public have not. Though the knowledge a scholar possesses must be potentially valuable, it is not necessary that he recognise its value himself; it is always possible that the pupil to whom he imparts his knowledge has a better sense of its value that he. In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments.
The last three services demand, not superior knowledge, but superior insight. A critic shows superior insight if the questions he raises are fresh and important, however much one may disagree with his answers to them. Few readers, probably, find themselves able to accept Tolstoi’s conclusions in What is Art? but, once one has read the book, one can never again ignore the questions Tolstoi raises. [W.H. Auden]

I sincerely believe that the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic; not a cold analytical type of criticism, which, claiming to explain everything, is devoid of hatred and love, and deliberately rids itself of any trace of feeling, but, since a fine painting is nature reflected by an artist, the best critical study, I repeat, will be the one that is that painting reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind. Thus the best accounts of a picture may wel be a sonnet or an elegy. [Charles Baudelaire]

I can’t help thinking of the critic who would not try to judge, but to bring into existence a work, a book, a phrase, an idea. He would light the fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, snatch the passing dregs in order to scatter them. He would multiply, not the number of judgements, but the signs of existence; he would call out to them, he would draw them from their sleep. Would he sometimes invent them? So much the better. The sententious critic puts me to sleep. I would prefer a critic of imaginative scintillations. He would not be sovereign or dressed in red. He would bear the lightning flashes of possible storms. [Michel Foucault]

All criticism, after all, is a criticism of the critic himself before it is one of the criticized. [George Nathan]

In music, at a more radical level than in either literature or the arts, the best of intelligence, interpretative and critical, is musical. Asked to explain a difficult étude, Schumann sat down and played it a second time. We have already noted that the most ‘exposed’, therefore engaged and responsible act of musical interpreatation, is that of performance. In ways closely analogous to those we have cited in texts, paintings or sculptures, the criticism of music truly answerable to its object is to be found within music itself. The construct of theme and variation, of quotation and reprise, is organic to music, particularly in the West. Criticism is, literally, instrumental in the ear of the composer.
Almost cruelly, we can contrast the communicative wealth of the musical with the waste motions of the verbal. The singular concision of complex moods in Chopin defies discourse. It is made explicit in Busoni’s variations. But these variations are also a criticism in the finest sense: the tonal strengths of the Busoni version point out certain complacencies in Chopin’s ready art. Consider the critical authority in Mozart’s rearrangements and reorchestrations of Messiah; in Beethoven’s ten variations, at once attentive and critically magisterial, on a duet from Salieri’s Falstaff. Liszt’s transcriptions for piano from Italian opera, from classical symphonies, from the compositions of his contemporaries, notably Wagner, go a long way to suggest that Liszt’s was the foremost critical (if not self-critical) tact in the history of Western music. Together, these transcriptions make up a syllabus of enacted criticism. [George Steiner]

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves. [E. M. Cioran]

What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to intepret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art…
For the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted… by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances…
It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’ It is to turn the world into this world. (‘This world’! As if there were any other)…
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable…
It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else…
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. [Susan Sontag]

Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, deprecating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room. [W. Somerset Maugham]

Therefore it is hardly criticism to assert that the proper literary work is one that we can read twice; or one that causes in us some remarkable physiological effect, such as oblivion of the outer world, the flowing of tears, visceral or laryngeal sensations, and such like; or one that induces perfect illusion, or brings us into a spiritual ecstasy; or even one that produces a catharsis of our emotions. [John Crowe Ransom]

You meditate for months; in you an idea becomes flesh; it palpitates, it lives, you caress it; you adopt it intimately; you know its contours, its limits; its deficiencies, its reliefs, its recesses; at once its genealogy and its descendants. As soon as you present in public some exposé of this prolonged meditation, immediately a critic rises up to declare in peremptory fashion that you know nothing about it, and he does so in the name of common sense, that is to say of the most common opinion, that is to say the most conventional – to get away from which your entire effort tended. [André Gide]

Critical theory – a whole subject devised for no other purpose than the stimulation of underemplyed or umeployable intellects – is incapable of accepting a straightforwardly boring solution to anything, regardless of how correct it might prove. It would contracdict its status as a pastime. [Don Paterson]

The real connoisseurs in art are those who make people accept as beautiful something everybody used to consider ugly, by revealing and resuscitating the beauty in it. [Edmond & Jules de Goncourt]

 

CRITICS

The critic, thanks to the natural sheepness of his wits, becomes aware of his own deficiencies through the medium of the work of art. This is the tragedy of all critics: they see faults instead of art. For the critic, seeing art consists of marking all the faults in red ink and writing comments underneath. [Kurt Schwitters]

… the same class as Hope-Tipping, who will be remembered for his masterly strictures on D.H. Lawrence’s neglect of the sexual relationship, and on ‘the almost open sadism of Charles Lamb.’” [John Gross]

Critics love mediocrity. [Giacomo Puccini]

The general and musical culture shown in Hanslick’s writings represents one of the unlovelier forms of parasitism; that which, having the wealth to collect objets d’art and the birth and education to talk amusingly, does not attempt a stroke of artistic work, does not dream of revising a first impression, experiences the fine arts entirely as the pleasures of a gentleman, and then pronounces judgement as if the expression of its opinion were a benefit and a duty to society. [Donald Tovey]

Critics write about critics, and the bright young man, instead of regarding criticism as defeat, as a gradual, bleak coming to terms with the ash and grit of one’s limited talent, thinks of it as a career of high note. This would be merely funny; but it has a corrosive effect. [George Steiner]

The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand. [George Moore]

Criticism is prejudice made plausible. [H.L. Mencken]

Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a statue in honor of a critic. [Jean Sibelius]

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist. [Leslie Fiedler]

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D. [Nelson Algren]

Critics are the products of their own times and biases and what they have to say about works of art is as transient and insubstantial as fashion. [Robert Genn]

 

CRYING

… let us ask ‘What happens when one cries?’ What happens is that a curtain drops between us and the world. Crying enables us not to see. It is a way of distracting us from the sight of what has upset us, or rather of making it disappear. Crying never simply coincides with distress: it is not its immediate and inevitable effect. It is above all a reaction to distress – the most infantile reaction, one might say: the reaction of someone who, faced with a world that thwarts, no longer wants to look and to reason, but performs the equivalent of a magic gesture aimed at making it go away…
No dialectic could ever heal this laceration which constitutes the human subject, suspended between the two poles of causality and teleology, reality and desire – equally necessary to his existence, but which could never balance. It is at a specific moment in the relationship between the two poles that crying is ‘triggered’: the moment when the tension finally drops because desire and teleology are shown to be futile, unattainable. Hence the contradictory sensation of crying: definitive sadness, because the loss is definitive; and at the same time relief, because, if nothing else, all inner conflict has ceased…
It should not therefore surprise us that crying is often considered to be something hypocritical. To a large extent it really is. It is a surrender to reality which at the same time pays blatant homage to that ideal which tried to wage war on it. It is the way of appeasing one’s conscience that is typical of false consciousness; and indeed it is good to be suspicious of someone who is too prone to tears. But someone who never cries is worse still, because when one cries one is at least admitting that, in the reconciliation with the world, something important has been lost – that it is thus not a true reconciliation, more a defeat. And one can at least hope that the person who admits – if only through tears – the reality of defeat has not entirely extinguished the desire for revenge, and may one day decide against resignation to a mutilated human condition. [Franco Moretti]

 

CURIOSITY

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last. [Samuel Johnson]

… lying on the grass, looking at the sun, and wondering. [James Maxwell's earliest memory]

Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity? [Ronald Reagan]

Every study undertaken by Man was the genuine outcome of curiosity, a kind of game. All the data of natural science, which are responsible for Man’s domination of the world, originated in activites that were indulged in exclusively for the sake of amusement. When Benjamin Franklin drew sparks from the tail of his kite he was thinkoing as little of the lightning conductor as Hertz, when he investigated electrical waves, was thinking of radio transmission. Anyone who has experienced in his own person how easily the inquisitiveness of a child at play can grow into the life work of a naturalist will never doubt the fundamental similarity of games and study. The inquisitive child disappears entirely from the wholly animal nature of the mature chimpanzee. But the child is far from being buried in the man, as Nietzsche thinks. On the contrary, it rules him absolutely. [Konrad Lorenz]

… the motive that will conquer cancer will not be pity nor horror; it will be curiosity to know how and why. And the desire for service, said Lord Tamar. As the justifi cation of that curiosity, said Mr. Sempack, but not as a motive. Pity never made a good doctor, love never made a good poet. Desire for service never made a discovery. [H.G. Wells]

Curiosity is the lust of the mind. [Thomas Hobbes]

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization. [G.M. Trevelyan]

If a sound justification for most scientific activity is going to be found, it will eventually come perhaps from a recognition that man’s sense of curiosity about the world and himself is every bit as compelling as his need for clothing and food.… Making sense of the world and one’s place in that world has roots deep within the human psyche.… We can drop the dangerous pretense that science is legitimate only in so far as it contributes to our material well-being or to our store of perennial truths. Viewed in this light, the repudiation of theoretical scientific inquiry is tantamount to a denial of what may be our
most characteristically human trait. [Larry Laudan]

 

CYBERSPACE

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…
… mankind’s extended electric nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems. [William Gibson]

Whether Baudrillard calls it telematic culture or science fiction writers call it the Web, the Net, the Grid, the Matrix, or, most pervasively, cyberspace, there exists the pervasive recognition that a new and decentred spatiality has arisen that exists parallel to, but outside of, the geographic topography of experiential reality. As Vivian Sobchack explains: ‘Television, video cassetttes, video tape recorder/players, video games and personal computers all form an encompassing electronic system whose various forms “interface” to constitute an alternative and absolute world that uniquely incorporates the spectator/user in a spatially decentred, weakly temporalized and quasi-disembodied state.’
There are also the cybernetic systems which ‘incorporate’ no ‘spectator/users’ at all. The interlacing system of banking computers forms a complex global structure which is very nearly self-regulating. Paris links to New York which connects, in its turn, to Tokyo: the money, or data, never sleeps and never stops its circulation within what Jameson has called ‘the bewildering world space of late multinational capital’. [Scott Bukatman]

Digital electronic technology atomizes and abstractly schematizes the analogic quality of the photographic and cinematic into discrete pixels and bits of information that are transmitted serially, each bit discontinuous, discontiguous, and absolute – each bit ‘being-in-itself’ even as it is part of a system. [Vivan Sobchack]

Cyberspace: a new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world’s computers and communication lines. A world in which the global traffic of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments, and alter-human agency takes on form: sights, sounds, presences never seen on the surface of the earth blossoming in a vast electronic night. [Michael Benedkt]

The movement of wealth through the world communication system has created a kind of cyberspace. [Peter Schwartz]

 

CYBORG

Artificial intelligence is the next step in evolution. [Ed Fredkin]

Late-twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally-designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disrurbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. [Donna Hathaway]

Where we might expect greater resistance to mechanical replacements of vital and intimate organs, we find what sounds like the ultimate philosophical question, ‘Am I human or machine?” is answered by many people, ‘I don’t care, as long as I am.’ [Myron Krueger]

… as if dehumanization is so inevitable, we might as well learn to like it. [Charles Platt]

It would seem that at least three things characteristically human are out of reach of contemporary automata. In the first, place they incapable of laughter (or tears); secondly, they do not blush; thirdly, they do not commit suicide. It is conceivable that robots of the future may be capable of all three. However, until we have a better understanding of the nature of laughter it would be unwise to assume that we shall be able to teach robots how to laugh. The problem is rendered more complex by the fact that there seems to be a double relationship between the laughable and the automata. We laugh when we see a human being behave like an automaton; if a speaker, for example, moves his head in a tic-like, stereotyped fashion. The appearance of mechanism where we expect life provokes laughter. And conversely we laugh when a true robot behaves like a man, and the closer the resemblance the more comical we find the situation. It is a little hard to imagine a true robot laughing because another true robot seems lifelike or, alternatively because its designer appears to conduct himself like a fellow robot.
Blushing may not turn out to be much more manageable although both the anatomical and the psychological processes involved in blushing are fairly clear. The reader may wonder why blushing rather than other features of man is highlighted here. The answer is that blushing seems a singularly human phenomenon. It belongs to the expressive language of the human face. Its anatomical basis is an intricate system of capillaries which line the inner walls of the cheeks and which have a network of nerve fibres to serve them. This capillary action is the means of making our private feelings visible to an observer, for they make the blush possible. Monkeys flush in anger but they cannot be said to blush in shame. Perhaps the transition from plush to blush constitutes the dividing line between man and animal. Darwin called blushing ‘the most wondrous of all the wondrous powers of the mind… and the most human of all expressions.’ We blush when we feel exposed, physically or mentally, when we have been unmasked, when we have made what others see as a stupid mistake, when caught red-handed, when wrongly accused. We blush when we merely think about what someone else is thinking of what we are thinking. The common factor in these various situations is that we feel ourselves caught in an impasse. We cannot for the moment find a way out; so there is nothing to do but blush. The blush is an outward manifestation of what subjectively is experienced as shame in the presence of others, and it takes place in the face because our experience of being in the presence of others is somehow localised in the face, which is that part of us offered to public display. But we do not only blush for shame. Darwin remarked that a pretty girl blushes when a boy gazes at her even though she knows perfectly well that his gaze is one of admiration. Her blush draws attention to herself while enhancing her charms.
As Buytendijk has remarked, with his customary shrewdness, girls blush more than boys because the significance of exposure is not the same for them as it is for boys. And this is due to the fact that a girl’s relationship to her body differs from a boy’s relationship to his, just as her relationships to other people are different from his. The adolescent girl, unlike her brother, feels her relationship to others mediated through her body, and particularly through her clothes, which serve the ambiguous purpose of covering and revealing at one and the same time. Adolescence, furthermore, is a phase when girls are more sensitive than ever to their appearance. The merest glance can provoke a blush, and the girl feels helpless, as if her protective covering had been torn aside.”
In the light of this, we cannot now foresee how a future computer could be programmed to blush in suitable embarrassing circumstances, and we have to bear in mind that it is just as human not to blush when we should as to blush when we shouldn’t.
Thirdly, suicide on the part of any future robot may have to be ruled out. A robot may be endowed with the capacity to bring about its own disorganisation when conditions reach a given threshold of stress. But true suicide implies a foreknowledge of death and some idea of its significance, and this is a privilege of man.
In general, whatever refinements and novelties are introduced into artefacts in the foreseeable future, man is destined to remain for a very long time, the lightest, most reliable, most cheaply serviced and the most versatile general-purpose computing device made in large quantities by unskilled labour. [J. Cohen]

An automaton is an artificial representation of a human being, or an animal or a natural object, mechanically endowed with the power of movement. An android, which is a simulacrum of a man or a woman that has every appearance of being alive, ought – at least in theory – to be more accomplished than an automaton, and to deliver a more perfect imitation of its model. It is a question of language, of course, but androids belong more in the realm of magic, and automata in the realm of play and theatre, where artifice rules. It is therefore quite right to be less concerned with the first, being more or less an ideal vision of the mind, than with the second. Yet there are a few questions which we ought to consider, nonetheless.
As soon as we start talking about nature and artifice I find myself thinking of Baudelaire, whose entire work is divided between those two extremes. And there are a number of ways, it seems to me, in which automata relate to Baudelaire’s world. That is what interests me most about them, that and the dandyism I perceive in collectors and enthusiasts. In fact, I think that what those people are looking for is not so much an accurate imitation of life as a kind of mask, a pretense which leans toward mockery, almost a brilliant joke produced at the expense of life, as the theatre often is for theatre-lovers. In Baudelaire’s world the dandy loves the actress and the prostitute because they are both radically different from the natural woman, and not only in their costume and make-up. In L’Eve future, Villiers de l’Isle Adam describes a mechanical woman, an android, who has become the ideal woman for one extreme dandy, the only one he can tolerate. In fantasies of this sort, which are hard to imagine outside the context of ’spleen,’ luxury is extremely important. The automaton, likewise, has to be seen as a luxury plaything, quite as suitable to entertain fortune’s favourites as to provide a moment’s wonder for the underprivileged. The automaton is a thing of illusion, and its proper place should be a house of illusions. Baudelaire, who of course wrote a short Morale du jouet, might easily have been inspired to write an essay on it.
Also, one of the main sources of pleasure in watching automata is the repetition of movement, something that man himself lacks, though one does find it in actors and soldiers on the parade ground. Yet the latter, men who have been turned into machines, are in fact as much the reverse of automata, which are machines in human form, as they are similar to them. And the word ‘automaton’ contains a contradiction, because it applies both to spontaneity of movement and to the mechanisation of it. Thus we come back to the idea of ambiguity and the light it casts on the strange spell automata exercise over us.
There is much more that could be said about the unsettling delight man takes in knowing full well that he is being deceived… A fondness for automata is not such an innocent pleasure as it seems, even though there are no laws or religious prohibitions against it. If I carried on with this train of thought, it would not be long before I was back with Baudelaire again. [André Pieyre de Mandiargues]

… the idea of the automaton has lost none of its old evocative power, but, in fact, has taken on an exemplary function. On the one hand, it preserves the symbolic relationship between technology and man as something basic and metaphysical, involving the fundamental questions of life, the cosmos and culture; and, on the other, as contemporary artists have noticed, it plays the role of a ’screen-image,’ of a sort of fatal necessity that allows man to escape from thinking about his contingency, individuality and, in the end, his freedom. Fate is thereby deliberately invested with the attributes of a factitious autonomy. There is no need for any reminder of the excesses of industrial and factory organisation, which is rationalised into inhumanity, leaving almost no scope for the individual; in this respect automation has become a social – and, predominantly, an economic – idea, with the technical dimension constituting no more than a means, and man no more than a minor instrument. More concretely still, we can examine quickly some contemporary automatic machines designed to imitate, simulate or even replace human beings. Given the way not only philosophy, but aesthetics, literature and science in our culture are marked heavily by the duality of body and soul, of mind and matter, it is understandable that the earliest constructions of automata should have set themselves the task of simulating and replacing the body. Yet, as can be seen in Pascal, Leibniz and Babbage, as well as in the more recent concerns of Wiener and Turing, a desire to imitate and extend the calculating and intellectual faculties of the mind has gradually developed. And although the wilder fantasies of the 1950s have (nobody dreams of absolutes, like unbeatable automatic chess players, any more), this second enterprise has in fact been more successful than the first, since it is much easier to construct machines that are capable of high intellectual performance than it is to find an automaton capable of expressing in any real way ordinary, tangible sensations like hunger, sorrow or fear. [J.C. Beaune]

If men create intelligent machines, or fantasize about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it. By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge, much as entrusting power to politicians allows us to disdain any aspiration of our own to power.
If men dream of machines that are unique, that are endowed with genius, it is because they despair of their own uniqueness, or because they prefer to do without it – to enjoy it by proxy, so to speak, thanks to machines. What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself.
It is not for nothing that they are described as ‘virtual’, for they put thought on hold indefinitely, tying its emergence to the achievement of a complete knowledge. The act of thinking itself is thus put off for ever. Indeed, the question of thought can no more be raised than the question of the freedom of future generations, who will pass through life as we travel through the air, strapped into their seats. These Men of Artificial Intelligence will traverse their own mental space bound hand and foot to their computers. Immobile in front of his computer, Virtual Man makes love via the screen and gives lessons by means of the teleconference. He is a physical – and no doubt also a mental – cripple. That is the price he pays for being operational. Just as eye-glasses and contact lenses will arguably one day evolve into implemented prostheses for a species that has lost its sight, it is similarly to be feared that artificial intelligence and the hardware that supports it will become a mental prosthesis for a species without the capacity for thought.

Artificial intelligence is devoid of intelligence becausee it is devoid of artifice. True artifice is the artifice of the body in the throes of passion, the artifice of the sign in seduction, the artifice of ambivalence in gesture, the artifice of ellipsis in language, the artifice of the mask before the face, the artifice of the pithy remark that completely alters meaning. So-called intelligent machines deploy artifice only in the feeblest sense of the word, breaking linguistic, sexual or cognitive acts down into their simplest elements and digitizing them so that they can be resynthesized according to models. They can generate all the possibilities of a programme or of a potential object. But artifice is in no way concerned with what generates, merely with what alters, reality. Artifice is the power of illusion. These machines have all the artlessness of pure calculation, and the games they offer are based solely on commutations and combinations. In this sense they may be said to be virtuous, as well as virtual: they can never succumb to their own object; they are immune even to the seduction of their own knowledge. Their virtue resides in their transparency, their functionality, their absence of passion and artifice. Artificial intelligence is a celibate machine.

What must always distinguish the way humans function from the way machines function, even the most intelligent of machines, is the intoxication, the sheer pleasure, that humans get from functioning. The invention of a machine that can feel pleasure is something – happily – that is still beyond human capacity. All kinds of spare parts are available to humans to help them achieve gratification, but none has yet been devised that could take pleasure in their stead. There are prostheses that can work better than humans, ‘think’ or move around better than humans (or in place of humans), but there is no such thing, from the point of view of technology or in terms of the media, as a replacement for human pleasure, or for the pleasure of being human. For that to exist, machines would have to have an idea of man, have to be able to invent man – but inasmuch as man has already invented them, it is too late for that. That is why man can always be more than he is, whereas machines can never be more than they are. Even the most intelligent among machines are just what they are – except, perhaps, when accidents or failures occur, events which might conceivably be attributed to some obscure desire on the part of the machine. Nor do machines manifest that ironical surplus or excess functioning which contributes the pleasure, or suffering, thanks to which human beings transcend their determinations – and thus come closer to their raison d’être. Alas for the machine, it can never transcend its own operation – which, perhaps, explains the profound melancholy of the computer. All machines are celibate.
(All the same, the recent epidemic of computer viruses does embody a striking anomaly: it is almost as though machines were able to obtain a sly pleasure by producing perverse effects. This is an ironc and fascinating turn of events. Could it be that artificial intelligence, by manifesting this viral pathology, is engaging in self-parody – and thus acceding to some sort of genuine intelligence?). [Baudrillard]

 

CYNICISM

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of telling the truth. [Lillian Hellman]

No matter how cynical you are, you can’t keep up. [Woody Allen]

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. [H.L. Mencken]

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism. [George Meredith]

A cynic is a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn’t any Santa Claus, and he’s still upset. [James Gould Cozzens]